You can slow things down, but not by more than a few years, because of the gradual democratization of training foundation models. Right now training a model competitive with chatgpt can be done for $150K (microsoft orca 13b). In a few years the cost will be low enough that individuals can train models. At that point regulating it will require draconian dictatorships.
I’m also very wary of the copyright angle on this, because just like we don’t prohibit people from learning copyrighted materials in their brains, it feels very wrong to regulate how we train digital brains. I’m ok with forbidding the output of copies of individual existing copyrighted works, but we already have laws on the books for that. I find it downright immoral to prohibit the generation of works “in the style of”. That again reeks like the kind of draconian society I don’t want to live in.
People will always be willing to pay for human-made art, just like we pay more for handmade pots, even though machines can make them better, so I think the doomsayers who predict the end of art are flat out wrong. Easy access to mass-generated AI content could be the best thing that happened to true artists, just like chess AI that can beat every human player was the best thing that happened to the chess world. We need labeling laws that show the origin of works so people can choose whether they want artificial or human-made, but please not another extension of the copyright regime to be even more suffocating and hostile of cultural flourishing.