Both an AI and an art student are a complex web of weights that take inputs and returns an output. Agreed.

But the inputs are vastly different. An art student has all the inputs of every moment leading up to the point of putting paint to canvas. Emotion, hunger, pain, and every moment that life has thrown at them. All of them lead to very different results. Every art piece affects the subsequent ones.

The AI on the other hand is purely derivative. It’s only ever told about pre-existing art and a brief interpretation of it. It does not feel emotion. It does not worry about paying its bills or falling in love. It builds a map of weights once and that is that. Every input repeated however many times will yield exactly the same output.

And yes, you have the artists who are professional plagiarists, making hand-painted Picasso imitations of someone’s chihuahua for $20 over the internet. But they’re not mass producing derivative work by the thousands.

I fully agree with the shit-in, shit-out sentiment, and researchers should be free to train their models of whatever data they need.

But monetising their models, that by definition are generating derivative works is another matter.