> What is known is that the majority believe that if artists were to be copied, they should at least be compensated.
I get the emotional side of this argument - artists going hungry while someone else cashes in on their ideas. But compensation is a dangerous premise, because derivative art is an established type of artistic freedom. Artists routinely mimic styles, or work within the bounds of styles established by masters, but they've never been expected to compensate those styles' pioneers. Imagine it as a precedent:
"Your stuff borrows from Warhol? Guess what buddy, you owe the Warhol estate x% of your sale."
Perhaps you're arguing things change when commercial interests are involved? But again, this has never been the case for advertising companies (with their hired artistic guns) or any kind of graphic design leaning on established artistic styles for effect and making a killing in the process.
In the case of AI, even if it has a commercial master, it seems much closer to the borrowing of an ordinary artist. It's a trained entity, with deep understanding of styles, capable of making new works. On top of that, it works under the instruction of a user with their own ideas, whose guidance is crucial in deciding the work's final state. The user is the artist here - like one of the visionaries who delegate the nitty gritty of production to helpers. In this case the helper is leased from the AI company, which is more like an agency supplying those helpers.
All in all it's hard to see how any compensation model wouldn't end up constricting the artistic freedom most of these artists depend on.
You can’t derive works at scale manually. We’re talking about a machine here.
I suggest you look into the history of art, specifically how artists have operated studios or "factories" where apprentices produced replicas of the master's work. Modern artists have numbered prints, where they reproduce their work at scale to as a revenue source. Sol Lewitt produced instructions for his art, and people reproduce them as public murals all over the place. see: https://massmoca.org/event/sol-lewitt-a-wall-drawing-retrosp...
The 'machine' existed long before the AI companies in university art studies, galleries and republication, and the scale came from the graduates or ordinary acolytes borrowing wholesale the ideas and techniques they admired. Scale shouldn't alter the principle. Once there's a right to compensation established for derivation, you have to explain why it doesn't apply to the millions of artists making a living from exactly that.
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