Copyright unencumbered... For their own characters?? Why would they need clearance to generate things trained on their data.
The consequence being that for everyone complaining that AI is disrupting artists right now: these will, in hindsight, be the halcyon years. Even if we assume the copyright arguments hold water in court and AIs trained on other people's copyrighted material are ruled poison-fruit machines, the end result isn't the end of synthesizing-AIs... It's synthesizing-AIs only being owned by people with a big enough data portfolio to train them. Techno-anarchy replaced with techno-corporatocracy, and the smaller-volume artists still lose on being unable to out-produce their competition in an art market.
To the extent that art intersects capitalism, that matters (even if the second artist is charging thousands per work; when your price is too high, people can't buy, so the artist charging dozens or hundreds per work but making 5,000 a year can sell to all the people who can't afford five-works-a-year).