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The conversation began with 'fuck copyright,' so no, restraints on new works are at least as relevant as money.

Restraints on derivative works seem directly relevant to railing against AI training. I don't think fanart goes on your side of the table. You're taking a stand for amateur references to immense professional works. Presumably on the basis that Disney can keep doing its thing no matter how many people draw their own weird Zootopia comics - yeah? I for one would argue the environment someone grew up in is fair game for them to build from, as much for Star Wars as for ancestral fairy tales.

The environment of the internet is a pile of everyone's JPGs. We think nothing of amateur galleries where people mimic popular styles, borrow characters, and draw frankly unreasonable quantities of low-quality pornography. I'm not up-in-arms about AI because it's more of the same. I barely understand the objection. An entity learned English from library books? Yeah, that's how everything that can read English learned to read English. You couldn't understand this sentence without exposure to countless examples of text that were not explicitly provided for your education. So if there's a pile of linear algebra that can emit drawings, and it was shaped by looking at a ton of drawings that other people posted-- then-- as opposed to what?

The economic concerns are simpler: Hollywood is doomed. This is refrigeration, and they sell ice for iceboxes. They imagine it's going to make ice much easier to sell, since they won't need people to harvest and import it. In reality their entire business model is fucked, because their customers also won't need people to harvest and import it.

If they don't need a studio full of artists to make a cartoon movie... neither do you. Neither do all the artists they cast off. We cannot be far from models that tween pretty damn well on their own, and can be guided to tween flawlessly. The near future is not about to have less human art. No more than when Flash obviated colored paint on clear plastic.

Whether or not that's going to make anyone appropriate amounts of money under late capitalism is another question entirely, but it's not like artists were famously well-off before, and in any case Disney delenda est.

Even if text to image generators are able to improve to be better than human artists, people won't stop making art just because a computer can do it faster.