This seems to be a thorny dilemma.
The art has to be printed out and that is the art. Anyone can get an image of Salvator Mundi for free too. That is not the art, that is an image. The art is the physical object that is the painting Salvator Mundi.
It is no different than traditional art really, just at a different scale. You can buy really nice Picasso knock offs on ebay right now. Picasso himself could have made 10 copies of the Weeping Woman to sell without that much effort either. The "real" Weeping Woman is the physical painting that Picasso did not make a copy of. The others are just knock off images.
But the main problem remains. Selling art is really hard. AI art is already completely passé anyway. If anything the technology is regressing visually.
Music was in a several decades long bull market in physical media sales that crashed and burned. Now we have gone back to the pre-music media bubble days but with much better distribution and marketing channels.
Not a lot of people making a living playing ragtime piano or hoofers making a living tap dancing either.
The real amusing thing to me is you never hear scultpure artist complain that they are in the training data sets. Probably because they know it is literally just free advertising for their real art.
Like you, I don't think there's good news there, though. As an e.g. writer, you have to convert to selling ideas. The way you sell an idea is that you give it away, and if hearing it makes people like you they will give you arbitrary support. For a writer at least what that means is that only original, interesting work that stands out will be valuable, and it will not be valuable to the extent that it is good, but to the extent that it appeals to an audience. You might as well be a tap dancer.
And if you aren't original, you'll never stand out amongst the AI slop, which will get better and better (and nicer and more pleasant to read and more useful and all that good shit that technology does.) I don't know if that's a bad thing. We have gone from an excess of uninteresting expression in the world to an overwhelming amount of "me too" and worthless repetition filling every crevice. I've probably published 3K words on the internet today. The number before the internet would be zero; but even back then the bookstores were filled with crap.
The market for crap has been taken by AI. And as it gets better, as the crap sea level rises, it will eventually be over most content creators' heads.
The only future for an expression market is parasocial. You're going to have to make people like you, and take care of you because they think of you as family. It's no wonder that entertainment is merging into politics.
It might make more sense to update copyright laws to match reality. For a music artist, for example, pennies from Spotify mean nothing -- the majority of their revenue comes from concerts/events, merchandise, and commercial licensing of their work.
It is increasingly tiresome to see this clearly racist bias at work when every US company doing AI has been acting the same way.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
https://piracymonitor.org/chat-gpt-trained-using-pirated-e-b...
because the US AI companies flatly ignored US copyright and IP laws/norms in creating their models to begin with