Believe it or not, a lot of studios and organizations are coming out and saying that they will be refusing to use AI art due to the copyright risks it has.
That's more of a question of practicality.
What the AI is good for now is concept art which is already infinite by searching google for reference images.
And the artist are already using them as reference images since you would have to be stupid not to since whatever is generated would be ultimately disposable and not see the light of day so there is no legal issues.
The "hacks" you see with stable diffusion with Lora models and whatnot to get more consistency and set style are not worth their effort for marginal improvements that they aren't going to use anyway.
Even for a 2d game what they need is not a one off "piece" but full spectrum of parts, poses and animations.
Those who use AI art are those who can't hire artists in the first place or enthusiast that are curious in the tech.
But that isn't the full picture, once AI begins to touch upon things they care about you will see they are not as ambivalent as they seem.
They are already focusing on procedural generation in things like materials, textures and objects so it's inevitable AI will get involved in that.
Especially once you see full 3D model generation that is "game ready" that's when they start to care.
And copyright is not much of an issue to them since they already sitting on a mountain of training data that they legally own.
This is what artists don't seem to understand is most commercial art that they do to pay the bills have an Owner and it is not them.
The fact that Disney owns Mickey should tell you as much, a corporate entity owns the copyright, this is not a license.
Microsoft can come tomorrow and buy the whole of Getty Images, if they don't then Google might, once that happens it's a buying spree.
The only reason that has not happened is because they don't yet know what they need.
And the real battle will not even being fought on the arts.
The big battle is between Microsoft and Google, GPT and Palm, the thing that got me thinking is the training data they managed to scrounge up is something that they actually "need" as that is the factor that gives them the emergent capability, they can't afford to lose that magic so they must use it by any means.
The thing is they can't exactly own the whole of the internet so the likely case is to "lobby" on the copyright. Even if they try that would lead to a acquisition Cold War that I am not sure they want to get involved in, better to just be a duopoly.
I am sure they can call up Disney to give them some pointers on copyright lobbying.
