In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
Beginning artists also need good reference material to become good artists and create new transformative material, is that also copyright infringement? For training to be useful you need more refined material than what you can currently produce, that’s just how knowledge works. The goal of these AI isn’t to produce the same as it’s reference material, if it was then you’d have a case. You can easily see from the output of these generators that the vast majority of what it produces is transformative, confirming it’s intended goal.
Scraping data is also very well established as not infringing on copyright if used for analysis purposes. And if you’ve ever done any kind of analytical research yourself for a PhD or any kind of higher educational degree you know this to be a fundamental freedom required for a healthy society, not even just for artists to learn.
Proposing it should be seen the way you put it would essentially turn ideas into a property one can own and license, and I can tell you now, the same companies you probably dislike will own so many of these ideas that you could effectively do nothing without paying a license to one of them. Is this what you want?
And well, shouldn’t need to be said but, if a company gets sued when they think they’re in the right, they’re going to defend themselves lol. And as far as I know none of these lawsuits have been settled in the favor of artists claiming copyright infringement.