the_dunk_tank

That sounds like a very bad faith reading.

I am sure that there are plenty of people in the movement who are only looking for that, and I support things like the Writers Guild wanting protections in their contracts. That is not the dominant theme in the anti-AI movement. By far the most prominent voices are large corporations and a handful of fairly successful independent artists who are interested in strengthening copyright, which will be of little benefit to anyone who is not already wealthy enough to pursue a copyright infringement case. There's also plenty of people who do actually want to ban the technology outright or who fantasize about sabotaging it somehow, I don't know how anyone could follow anti-AI discourse and not see any of that. The likely outcome of strengthening copyright as part of this, though, is that large media companies will then continue to displace workers using AI tools while also making a larger share of money from the development from either selling access to datasets built from their internal libraries or by leveraging their exclusive access to said data, none of which actually benefits artists. IP law is not there to protect small artists, it is only capable of protecting those who can afford to go to court over it, everyone else will get fucked over as usual. But I'm sure that the Copyright Alliance and the handful of independent artists that they want to present as a human face will be pretty happy about it.

The one thing that this could restrict is open-source development of said models, which will make them harder to access for any independent artist who wishes to use them (if we assume that use of AI tools becomes a prevailing standard this will be necessary, if we assume that independent artists will be fine without them then presumably it follows that we don't need to do anything at all) by making sure that they are reliably behind a paywall and generating profits for either an AI company or a media company. At best, this leaves independent artists slightly worse off when accounting for the effort spent on putting this plan into action, at worst it would make it far more profitable for tech companies and media companies alike.

If a movement is claiming to do something in the name of labor, but material analysis shows that the plan is very obviously DOA and if anything will make the issue worse, I'm going to oppose that, and I am going to have heavy disagreements with the anti-AI movement as long as its dominant messaging is clinging to IP law in the hopes that it will somehow magically transform into something that benefits workers without comparable effort to what it would take to overthrow capitalism outright.