[Warning: IANAL] The problem is that you guys assume that those generator models are doing something remotely similar to humans studying and mimicking art from other humans. They don't; at the end of the day the comparison with music sampling is fairly apt, even if more or less complex it's still the same in spirit.

Furthermore from a legal standpoint a human being is considered an agent. Software is at the best seen as a tool (or even less), not as an agent.

Quantifying "how much" of a particular artist's training data was used in the output is hard even for music sampling. Or for painting, plenty works fall in a grey area between original and derivative.

It feels like expanding the definition of derivative works is more likely to result in companies going after real artists who mimic or are otherwise inspired by Disney/Pixar/etc and attempting to claim partial copyright rather than protecting real artists from AI ripoffs.

Following this reasoning (it'll get misused by the American media mafia), it's simply better off to get rid of copyright laws altogether, and then create another legal protection to artists both against the American mafia and people using image generators to create rip-offs.