I think we can put your last sentence in a more compact form:
If your entire livelihood depends on your art, get a stronger business.
or even better: if you make art, get a stronger business
or maybe simply: stop making art
or even better: if you make art, get a stronger business
or maybe simply: stop making art
That’s not really what I’m saying.
Large brand copyright holders gonna sue. It is part of their core business.
If you’re a musician, you gotta tour to make money. If you’re a painter, you need patrons.
There already were a ton of ways organised IP theft would make money on your creative force.
AI training seems different because it can gobble up anything out of order and somehow digest it into something valuable without human intervention.
The training is absurdly expensive, but considering how they capture the profit on the value created, and the training input owners won’t, will just mark the end of the open internet for non-FOSS normies.
No dollars burned, just huge huge amounts of cultural capital. Just a reduction to a more primitive, less cultured/developed version of what it means to be human. Less thinking out loud, sharing of thoughts, exposure to new thoughts. More retreating into (a now lesser developed, now culturally atrophied) self.
In the poster shop you can choose between a bunch of classics, or you can upload your own AI-generated picture and have that printed as a poster.
Art was always expensive, and posters as an alternative to paintings existed way before AI. Same with copying all kinds of art.
The main difference seems to be that we can’t clearly pay royalties to anyone for AI artwork, because it’s not obvious exactly where it came from.
There was a YouTube channel dedicated to Warhammer lore narrated by an AI David Attenborough. It got taken down for infringing on his voice, but its replacement came up, starting out with a generic old man’s voice and over time gradually more Attenborough-like. When should the Attenborough estate start to get royalties? At 60% Attenborough? Or at 80% Attenborough?
I'll answer your question, but my question for you is: why were you buying wall decorations in the first place? To me, it sounds like you were searching for a product category, and not specifically for art.
Regarding your example, if the AI is capable of imitating David Attenborough by including his name in the prompt, then it was probably trained on his data. If he didn't consent, then I might argue that is ethically wrong and, in my view, theft. If the channel was not monetized and done without his consent, I might argue that is just an ethical failing. In using his voice, the channel betrays the fact that it has value, otherwise they would continue to use the random old man voice.