“My fear is that our industry will be diminished to such a point that very few of us can make a living,” Ortiz says, anticipating that artists will be tasked with simply editing AI-generated images, rather than creating.
This feels very prescient. Maybe there will be laws passed to compensate artists for feeding their work to an AI, but there's no way companies will avoid using AI to do the heavy lifting.
The Guild’s core proposal is this: AI-generated material can't replace a human writer. AI-generated material cannot qualify as source material for adaptation in any way. AI-generated work can be used as research material, just as a Wikipedia article could, but because of the unclear nature of the sources that go into its output and how the output is generated, it has no place as an "author" in the world of copyright. AI outputs are not, in the Guild's opinion, copyrightable.
That means that if a studio wants to use an AI-generated script, there can be no credited author and no copyright. In a world where studios jealously guard the rights to their work, that's a major poison pill.
I think this would be a decent compromise. It feels like the core of the AI art fight is really who can make money off of it.