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!
What happens when AI advances to the point where it can do everything it does today (and more) without using copyrighted training material?
This is inevitable (and in fact some models already use only licensed training data), so I think it’s a bad idea to focus so much on this angle. If what you’re really worried about is the economic impact, then this is a dead-end argument. By the time any laws pass, it will likely be irrelevant because nobody will be doing that anyway. Or only the big corporations who own the copyrights to a bajillion properties (e.g. Disney) will do it in-house and everyone else will be locked out. That’s the exact opposite of what we should be fighting for.
The concept of “art” changes based on technology. I remember when I first starting fiddling with simple paint programs, just scribbling a little shape and using the paint-bucket tool to fill in a gradient blew my mind. Making in image like that 100 years prior would have been a real achievement. Instead of took me a minute of idle experimentation.
Same thing happened with CGI, synthesizers, etc. Is sampling music “art”? Depends what you do with it. AI should be treated the same way. What is the (human) artist actually contributing to the work? This can be quantified.
Typing “cat wearing sunglasses” into Dall-E will give you an image that would have been art if it were made 100 years ago. But any artistry now is limited to the prompt. I can’t copyright the concept of a cat wearing sunglasses, so I have no claim to such an image generated from such a simple prompt.