When automobiles were popularized, entire generations of families and people devoted to horsecraft suddenly found their business model obsolete. Did we as a society need to come together to ask how talented people in the horse industry might be able to continue to profitably dedicate their lives to that task? No, we just let the market figure it out, and allowed change to occur.
Our take an alternate thought experiment. Imagine a world where recipes were patentable. The first person to make mac-and-cheese could patent that, claim ownership of mac-and-cheese, and ban every other person and restaurant from making and selling mac-and-cheese. There would, of course, be an entire industry devoted to this. There would be restaurant chains that own the idea of pizza, burgers, etc., and stop any and everyone else from making that. There would be small and boutique recipe crafters creating and profiting from their unique recipes, too. And of course, people in this industry would ferociously sue anyone who "stole" the recipes that they "owned." And they would ask the same questions you're asking: "What ever would we do in a world where recipe owners don't get to uniquely monopolize their creations because they're allowed to be appropriated by others?" And the answer is: that business model wouldn't simply exist, and the world would be just fine without it.
It's not clear to me why any particular profession or business model needs to be protected into existence. The world will be just fine if some business model that always worked gradually ceases to become viable. I have sympathy for the people in those professions, but it happens all the time, and is a necessary consequence of technological innovation and progress.
In the 1800s, the Luddites smashed up factory equipment and tried to make it illegal, because they wanted to protect labor jobs. Thankfully they lost, and now we have a world with better jobs, which they could not have imagined.
Your car/horse example makes no sense in this context because the existence of cars is not predicated on the existence of horses. On the other hand, GenAI is not possible without the art that forms the training data.
For thousands of years, human workers and artists have trained themselves by looking at copies of other people's work, and used the ideas and inspiration the gain from that material to produce new works. Artists will literally sit down and copy another artist's work as part of training. This happens as a matter of course. Sometimes the new works produced after training are fresh and original. And just as often, they are derivative copycats (see: fan fiction, most clothing, most music, half the stuff on DeviantArt, etc.).
The law is only concerned with a creator's output, not the input.
If you produce and distribute something that's an obvious copy of someone else's work, that could be a copyright violation. However, if what you produce is sufficiently original, it's fair game, regardless of who you were inspired or trained by. The law does not require compensating or crediting those who inspired you or helped with training. Again, the law is only concerned with output, not with training, not with inspiration, not with input.
What you are advocating for is a huge change. Would this change apply to humans who are learning/training by looking at and copying others' work? If so, that would be a nightmare. If not, why not? Why only apply it to AI? Because the AI is more efficient at it than humans?
If that's your reason, could you justify it? New technology is always more efficient than the status quo. That's the entire point of new technology. Making laws to stop it accomplishes nothing except limiting technology in order to protect old jobs and business models. Why should we do that?
That argument is absurd, you don't HAVE to be an artist. You can be a talented person and dedicate your life to something else.
Or you can be like everyone else and do it as a hobby in your time off because people don't find what you do creatively to be valuable. I demand I get paid for my playing video games, I think it's valuable and I dedicate my time to it, I deserve to be paid.
Fucking ridiculous.
