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> A lot of that existing content is copyrighted, and demonstrably present in the resulting product; so these companies have an uphill battle _not_ to be stopped by the courts.

These lawsuits will go exactly like in the war against piracy, impossible to win. Cut one head off, ten more appear.

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Piracy lawsuits won constantly, enough to push all piracy to the dark web. They even sued little old grandmas and won. No legitimate business today is built on top of piracy.

I'm not arguing that generative art will cease to exist, I'm just arguing that the path to legal revenue will involve paying copyright holders; and the real gold in this industry is in licensing training datasets to businesses that just want 'AI Magic' in their product marketing.

But they did win the war on piracy. They're still making tons of money, the piracy community is the same size or smaller than it was 10 years ago, and most of the people inside it are either committed cheapskates who would never have been customers, or committed collectors who while pirating are also buying twice as much as their neighbors.

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