Rewrite the following comment, but in uwu speak:

One potential wrench in the "image generation is going to take over all artwork" narrative is that there have been a couple of limited rulings now from judges that AI-generated artwork can't be copyrighted.

For now, everyone seems to be mostly just ignoring that entirely and pretending those rulings don't exist. And I'm sure that if image generation does take off companies will lobby hard enough to get it copyright protections applied to it.

But ethical/legal questions about repurposing existing artwork without permission aside, it would be profoundly interesting to see companies have to grapple with "you can have unlimited free labor, but the results aren't going to be exclusively yours."

I don't know if I'm completely, 100% convinced they'd take the trade, at least not until they were forced to in order to keep up with other companies. Monopoly is something that is so heavily baked into our current economic models. I think it's probably pretty common for companies to low-key care a lot more about exclusivity than costs.

My frustration with AI image generation isn't really moral, in except that I hate to see algorithms granted more human rights than humans. Current copyright in the US is awful. Our definition of what is and isn't a "derivative work" is wildly inconsistent; people have gotten sued just for writing music that takes inspiration from songs.