Meanwhile, the lawsuit against Midjourney for training on copyrighted work is going... not that great[0]. The judge is paring down a lot of the arguments in the lawsuit.
The actual idea behind using copyright to stop AI is that if we give copyright owners of trained-on works the ability to veto that training, then we can just "stop AI". The problem is that most artists don't actually get to own their work. Publishers own the work, it's the first thing you have to bargain away in order to work with a publisher. So they're going to look at their vast dragon's horde of work, most of which isn't particularly profitable to them, and license it out to OpenAI, Stability, MidJourney, or whoever at pennies on the dollar because at their scale that becomes a pretty big deal.
To the publishers salivating over generative AI, this cost is not a big deal, because they already spend shittons on writers. So if your goal is to stop worker replacement, just adding a cost to that replacement isn't a good idea. Actually making it illegal or prohibited to actually replace workers with AI is the way to go.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/judge-pares-down-ar...