Even if artists could sue this is assuming there is someone making enough money to sue.

Open source models will likely be dominant (this was how Stable Diffusion got popular, it's not clear their new neutered 'safe' model will be as popular or a successful business).

This is the new reality even if the bigco gets sued out of business. Artists need to accept that reality eventually. Just like all "panics".

Fortunately AI generators are not a direct replacement for artists, I've seen it used as part of the design process, but that still takes talent. Maybe it will get better but it's not a one-stop shop for business use-cases. More likely it will be AI+artist, not AI replacing artist.

If an open-source model gets DMCA'd, then getting a copy becomes a hassle. This does not entirely stop things - people still have massive collections of Nintendo ROMs and downloaded films, but it's work to get it running in a way that, say the Stable Diffusion tool that Clip Studio Paint just announced is not.

A real open-sourced model trained on images that were explicitly licensed for such uses would be interesting. It would cost money but it would also not be hiding a ton of its actual cost by training it on images whose creator never imagined that "being dumped into a vast dataset" would be a thing that would happen, as well as images that were fine in their original context as "fair use" but got sucked in by the web crawlers feeding the dataset. You want to train an image-generating machine on my work? Ask my fucking permission and if I say "pay me" then you either negotiate a price we can both live with, or you do not put it in your dataset.

I do not accept your reality. Sue 'em all until you've gotta train your own damn datasets, or buy ones that have worked out the proper licensing. If Photoshop can be made to refuse to scan currency, then these things can be made to be fair to the artists whose shoulders they rest upon.