Digital art as a whole has already been made worthless by the creation of diffusion models, whether there is copyright on them really doesn't matter at that point, because pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce in under a minute.
"pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce in under a minute"
That's overstating it a bit.. but it is likely we'll get there within the next decade or so.
Currently there's still a lot of art that's hard for AI to mimic effectively, and only certain types of art can be created quickly and without much effort using AI.
The above is based on my experience of creating well over 5000 images in Midjourney, and keeping a close eye on AI generated art created by others.
It's amazing tech that's close to magic, but it still can't do everything.
You're neglecting the fact that the types of art that can be created quickly are the ones that make up the bulk of the training data, which are also the types of art most people will want to make.
> pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce
What? That's not true at all!
If you're talking about "art", most artists are fussy and want things exactly right. They will spend a long time tweaking the image, or combining different images, painting, processing, pixel-pushing to get the thing they imagined.
If you're talking about some random need for an image of a "horse with metal legs", and settle for whatever the AI spits out, and then call that "my valuable art", that's different.
You claim "all digital art is worthless because it can all be tweaked into existence in under a minute".
If that were true, I could show you any piece of digital art, be it 2D or 3D rendered, and you should have no trouble making an identical copy in under a minute using only diffusion models and tweaking! That is an impossible task, I promise.
I'm enjoying stable diffusion as a fun playground and rendering engine. But it can't magically produce the exact picture in my mind.
Even simple things like "hero tree in dark misty forest, old swing hanging from large twisted branch, path extending into gloom". The AI will produce a nice image, but not the one in my mind. The image in my mind is important for style or composition reasons relative to the whole work. Artists rarely think in terms of isolated one-hit-wonders, they are producing work with important and meaningful connected threads and detailed elements.
