But the point of good law isn’t to protect an established business model. If that were the case, we would have outlawed the loom because it displaced weavers, and the camera (sorry portrait painters) and the iPhone. (How many telegraph operators are left? None!)
When an artist learns to draw, they copy almost all their ideas from other art they’ve seen that they like. That’s how humans learn. I’m learning to compose music at the moment and everything that sounds good to me is probably a remix of musical ideas I’ve heard before in other songs. If I grew up in a different music tradition (say, ancient India) then all of my ideas about musicality would be different.
It seems to me that the only difference between me and stable diffusion is that stable diffusion copies less than I do, but from more sources.
Also, the idea that artists can’t learn each other’s styles is totally wrong. I heard an interview years ago with an art director at blizzard. The interviewer pointed out that blizzard’s games all have different art styles, and asked how they swap between styles. “Do you have different art teams?”. The art director laughed and said that was the difference between amateur artists and professionals. Professional artists can be given a style and a brief and they can draw in the style. When they move between games, he said, the whole art team spends about 2 weeks practicing concept art for game they’re moving to and critiquing each others’ work to align their styles. Then it’s smooth sailing. That’s how they hire artists too - they ask them to draw some concept art in the style of one of their games.
Sounds far fetched? That’s what we do when we hire and onboard programmers. Art for hire isn’t any different.