Raw LLM Responses

I'm not a lawyer, but for the better part of a year or two, I, along with other team members, have been involved in a copyright dispute against an individual who has stolen a project for years. My understanding is that under fair use the derivative work cannot be in competition with the original work. It needs to be in a different matter. That's covered in the fourth factor of the Fair Use clauses. On the topic of the usage of AI art, I totally agree. Artists shouldn't just have their work fed into an AI to spit out results without licensing or permission. I also do however think that certain aspects can be useful to artists too. For example, since I work with a project that upscales textures from one game into larger resolutions by hand, sometimes we will use AI upscaling or other similar features to use as a base when making a full texture. There are certainly functional aspects to it, therefore, that aren't actually all that bad, in fact they're actually a potential benefit to artists. The copyright infringement is definitely a potential issue, with that said, and there's a discussion to be had about the commodification of artwork. It's bad enough that copyright infringement in and of itself is already an issue, now there are more potential loopholes that can be accessed with emerging tools. Even for us, you'd think that upscaling textures for a game mightn't be all that unique. But even THAT stuff takes effort to create and actually make it look usable for its purpose. Quality assurance is one thing that AI might struggle to do for a while, as it currently does now. Nearly all the exceptionally rare times when I have used AI tools to help me create new textures I find various issues I have to go back and correct manually; sometimes to the point where it'd have been better if I had done it myself, commissioned someone else to do it, or just let another contributor pick it up (our project is unique as it is community-based). I think this can be a potential uphill battle for artists, for sure, but I also don't think it's the end of the world. I think the idea of AI tools being 100% accurate to what is demanded isn't going to be a thing, especially since, as you said, they rely on HUMAN WORK to provide an output.