Most generative AI is schlock. You're an exception, and I'd say you qualify as an artist, but the stuff I generate, and I'm guilty of being somewhat hypocritical between my anti-AI stance and my actual behavior, is generally schlock.
But for me, that's the not the real problem. Most writing is schlock, too, AI-generated or not.
The real problem for me still revolves around copyright.
Your arguments regarding Jack Skellington are legit, for sure. All art borrows and absorbs influence. Hell, most writing is a take on Shakespeare.
The problem with AI is one of scale. AI models gobble up artwork from across the internet and globe, and generate variances from its sources. These variances then get distributed en masse because there are millions of AI producers who don't have anything resembling your skill or talent level who spit out Burtonesque illustrations based on Tim Burton's work.
Unlike you, I don't spend 10K hours refining my token, occasional efforts. I spend about 2 minutes on a Midjourney prompt, and inject the result into a Medium story. I don't do it often, and usually only for my fiction stories, but I feel a little dirty everytime I do this. But there are millions of users like me doing the same thing. The result is an AI shlockapalooza.
My stance is that all AI modeling software needs to agree to a compensation system of some kind to pay creators of prior art. I don't know what such a compensation system looks like, given the vast number of sources models acquire their parameters from. Implementation details would be onerous.
I don't think YOU or any user should have to pay a dime. I think the responsibility belongs to the makers of the software.
This would ultimately mean that the AI software will have to charge higher usage fees.
I think the worst thing that happens in that scenario there is that the schlock will dissipate because the software won't be as freely available as it is now, and people like you will thrive even more. So I guess you actually do pay a little, but you and other skilled practioners of the art will be able to absorb the higher usage costs.
As an occasional user, I'm okay with being charged more, if that helps the cause.
I'm less concerned with the Tim Burtons of the world than I am the Rachel Lopezs of the world. Ms. Lopez designed the front cover of my novel. For all I know (I didn't ask) she used some stock photography for parts of it, but I know for sure she didn't use generative AI. This means that an illustrator got paid. That illustrator, in turn, is probably not well known, but her artwork has still been scanned and stored by AI.
Some of it may have even found its way into an generative AI in the Tim Burton style, altered just enough to now be unrecognizable, even to her.
Not only does she not get compensated for it, but because the novel was released by a small publisher, that small publisher may someday stop hiring designers like her, and just let AI do covers.
