I don't think that impacts legal things, however you are correct, AI art can never go away.
If the legal hammer falls on the bad side of this, corporations/people with decent sized assets are unable to use these tools without paying some sort of royalty.
>I understand why artists are depressed now
As someone who isnt an artist, I wish I could sketch something quickly, use controlnet, and have my idea turned into reality in a few seconds. Non artists are basically at the whim of other creators + the randomness of txt2img. Heck, it seems there is something I want changed with nearly every AI art picture, with actual art skills, you could fix these.
Just to be clear on my point, if I could sketch something, I could probably have perfect AI art in 10-15 minutes. Without those skills, it takes ~1-2 hours.
Controlnet + SD was really mind blowing all around. I understand why artists are depressed now, but people are already training hypermodels, textual inversions, and loras. Who knows what the future will bring ?
My two favorite hyper models are around oil paintings, and cars(for my husband, he is getting an AI car calendar for his birthday, let's see if he figures it out :)
This genie isn't going back into the bottle.