Unpopular Opinion

Good question.

Ok, so let's say the artist does exactly what the AI does, in that they don't try to do anything unique, just looking around at existing content and trying to mix and mash existing ideas. No developing of their own style, no curiosity of art history, no humanity, nothing. In this case I would say that they are mechanically doing the exact same thing as an AI is doing. Do I think I they should get payed. Yes! They spent a good chunk of their life developing this skill, they are a human, they deserve to get their basic needs met and not die of hunger or exposure. Now, this is a strange case because 99.99% of artists don't do this. Most develop a unique style and add life experience in their art to generate something new.

A Software Engineer can profit off their AI model by selling it. If they are make money by generating images, then they are making money off of hard working artists that should be payed for their work. That isn't great. The outcome of allowing this is that art will no longer be something you can do to make a living. This is bad for society.

It also should be noted that a Software Engineer making an AI model from scratch is 0.01% of the AIs being used. Most people, lay people, who have spent very little time developing art or Software Engineering skills can easily use an existing model to create "art". The result of this is that many talented artists that could bring new and interesting ideas to world are being out competed by one guy with a web browser producing sub-par sloppy work.

Good question!

First, that artist will only learn from a few handful of artists instead of every artist's entire field of work all at the same time. They will also eventually develop their own unique style and voice--the art they make will reflect their own views in some fashion, instead of being a poor facsimile of someone else's work.

Second, mimicking the style of other artists is a generally poor way of learning how to draw. Just leaping straight into mimicry doesn't really teach you any of the fundamentals like perspective, color theory, shading, anatomy, etc. Mimicking an artist that draws lots of side profiles of animals in neutral lighting might teach you how to draw a side profile of a rabbit, but you'll be fucked the instant you try to draw that same rabbit from the front, or if you want to draw a rabbit at sunset. There's a reason why artists do so many drawings of random shit like cones casting a shadow, or a mannequin doll doing a ballet pose, and it ain't because they find the subject interesting.

Third, an artist spends anywhere from dozens to hundreds of hours practicing. Even if someone sets out expressly to mimic someone else's style, teaches themselves the fundamentals, it's still months and years of hard work and practice, and a constant cycle of self-improvement, critique, and study. This applies to every artist, regardless of how naturally talented or gifted they are.

Fourth, there's a sort of natural bottleneck in how much art that artist can produce. The quality of a given piece of art scales roughly linearly with the time the artist spends on it, and even artists that specialize in speed painting can only produce maybe a dozen pieces of art a day, and that kind of pace is simply not sustainable for any length of time. So even in the least charitable scenario, where a hypothetical person explicitly sets out to mimic a popular artist's style in order to leech off their success, it's extremely difficult for the mimic to produce enough output to truly threaten their victim's livelihood. In comparison, an AI can churn out dozens or hundreds of images in a day, easily drowning out the artist's output.

And one last, very important point: artists who trace other people's artwork and upload the traced art as their own are almost universally reviled in the art community. Getting caught tracing art is an almost guaranteed way to get yourself blacklisted from every art community and banned from every major art website I know of, especially if you're claiming it's your own original work. The only way it's even mildly acceptable is if the tracer explicitly says "this is traced artwork for practice, here's a link to the original piece, the artist gave full permission for me to post this." Every other creative community writing and music takes a similarly dim views of plagiarism, though it's much harder to prove outright than with art. Given this, why should the art community treat someone differently just because they laundered their plagiarism with some vector multiplication?

Yes. Large groups of people acting in concert, with large amounts of funding and influence, must be held to the highest standards, regardless of whether they're doing something I personally value highly.

An individual's rights must be held sacred.

When those two goals are in conflict, we must melt the corporation-in-conflict down for scrap parts, donate all of its intellectual property to the public domain, and try again with forming a new organization with a similar but refined charter.

Shareholders should be, ideally, absolutely fucked by this arrangement, when their corporation fucks up, as an incentive to watch and maintain legal compliance in any companies they hold shares in and influence over.

Investment will still happen, but with more care. We have historically used this model to great innovative success, public good, and lucrative dividends. Some people have forgotten how it can work.

An AI model could be seen as an efficient but lossy compression scheme, especially when it comes to images... And a compressed jpeg of an image is still seen as a copy so why would an AI model trained on reproducing it be different?