Now, as for training "AI" models, who knows. You can argue it is the same thing a human is doing or you could argue it a new, different quality and should be under different rules. Regardless, the current copyright laws were written before "AI" models were in widespread use so whatever is allowed or not is more of a historic accident.
So the discussion needs to be about the intention of copyright laws and what SHOULD be.
And practically speaking, putting aside whether a government should even be able to legislate such things, enforcing such a law would be near impossible without wild privacy violations.
No, it would just legislate what images are and which ones are not on the training data to be parsed, artists want a copyright which makes their images unusable for machine learning derivative works.
The trick here is that eventually the algorithms will get good enough that it won't be necessary for said images to even be on the training data in the first place, but we can imagine that artists would be OK with that
They shouldn't be OK with that and they probably aren't. That's a much worse problem for them!
The reason they're complaining about copyright is most likely coping because this is what they're actually concerned about.
you have rights.
AIs don't.
Because they don't have will.
It's like arresting a gun for killing people.
So, as a human, the individual(s) training the AI or using the AI to reproduce copyrighted material, are responsible for the copyright infringement, unless explicitly authorized by the author(s).
It's quite possible to apply the same kind of protections to generative models. (I hope this does not happen, but it is fully possible.)
No they won't. If AI art was just as good as it is today, but didn't use copyrighted images in the training set, people would absolutely still be finding some other thing to complain about.
Artists just don't want the tech to exist entirely.