The problem with the claim that "AI just put together existing images" is that is... well, false.
When you are asking Midjourney or Dall-E to draw a cat they aren't browsing their catalog and picking a favorite cat among the millions of existing ones, they are using what they "learned" about the patterns that define the shape and "texture" of a cat observing millions of images and coming up with a new composition of a cat that never existed until minutes before.
Which is also what makes most of the complaints about "violating copyright" dodgy at best.
It will be hard to prove in a courtroom when the "copy" of your work is factually different from the original, given that you can't register/copyright a style.
If these AI companies are going to lose the legal battle, it will be all about the jury questioning their right to access the "training data" and not about the results being something "stolen".
There's also the other side of the coin, which is that even conceding that AI companies will have to compensate artists, it's hard to imagine the "quantification" of that compensation being anything but pitiful.
If your "stolen work" amounts to nothing more than one part in a billion of a dataset used for training the software, what sort of compensation per use should you really expect?
And when, exactly? Every time an image is elaborated? Used? Published?
And paid by whom? The company? The user who prompted the image? The site that hosts it?
Will we start taxing/putting down fan-artists and imitators too? They are doing essentially the same thing without passing through a software, after all.
Will we remove images from search engines, too?
