Easy!

Under the circumstances where the artists whose art was used to train the model explicitly consented to that (without coercion), licensed their art for such use, and were fairly compensated for that.

Plenty of artists would gladly paint for AI to learn from — just like stock photographers, or clip art designers, or music sample makers.

Somehow, "paying for art" isn't an idea that has entered the minds of those who use the art.

Perhaps because it wasn't asked enough.

Information wants to be free, and you shouldn't need consent to reuse information. Furthermore, this isn't coercion -- I could just as easily make the case that artists are trying to use coercion (government power via copy-restriction laws) to impose restrictions on AI trainers.

I would say the better approach is to try and pirate the large models as much as possible -- using them to train smaller, open models, so we aren't forced to use commercial AI as much.

This is not a good argument to not pay people. Minimum wage and labour laws make it harder to compete, but they are still a good thing for society.

We don’t let companies use unpaid labour of non consenting others in different cases just to make it easier to compete.

For the former, once the contributors have been paid, all of the capitalist-related issues that come with AI will still happen, just worse. More generally, the issues of artificial scarcity get worse as well, since now the models are no longer an abundant resource, but one controlled and restricted for profit.

Unless the answer is just "I don't care if future people get screwed over, I just want to be paid once/receive pennies in royalty".

Using your analogy, it's like minimum wage laws prevented open source software from existing because contributors need to be paid minimum wage.

I'd say it's different, either you work directly on an open source project and you know the license your work is under, or you license your own work to be/not be allowed to be used by for-profit companies.

>More generally, the issues of artificial scarcity get worse as well, since now the models are no longer an abundant resource, but one controlled and restricted for profit.

Sure but that should be done on a higher level, that takes on copyright largely instead of just letting artists and writers be screwed over. We are currently in a situation that only benefits one party anyway.

No. This only forces open, non-profit models to think a bit harder about incentives to provide artists for contributing their work into the training set.

What you exhibit here is a failure of imagination.

It's currently fair use to give an artist paintings and say I want something like this but different in these ways.

You can tell a script writer to watch Star Wars and write something similar.

Questions of copyright will depend on if the output is sufficiently transformative, not if copyrighted work was used as inspiration

I hate to make a sort-of standard Internet retort but artists (and "society") don't have any obligation to reserve some space for AI art to be OK within culture. Maybe such a possibility exists and maybe it doesn't. But given that present AI is something like a complex but semi-literal average of the art works various largish companies could find, it seems reasonable to respond to people's objections to that.