all sorts of religious prohibitions and moral scares HAVE ended up in the law. The idea is that the “collective” is large enough to dispel any niche restrictive beliefs.

I’m rather confused by this. My point is that having the collective’s religious prohibitions and moral scares imposed upon the minority is a bad thing, and that it’s a flaw in “majority rule” that a rights-based legal system is supposed to attempt to counter. It doesn’t always work but that’s the idea. So simply having a large number of people pull out pitchforks and demand that the rights of AI trainers be restricted should not automatically result in that actually happening.

With regard to your scenario about furry art: You’re simply describing a specific example of the general scenario I already talked about. You’re saying that furry artists should have a right to copyright their “style”, which is emphatically not the case. Style cannot be copyrighted (and as a furry-adjacent who’s seen plenty of furry art over the years, I would also very much disagree that every furry artist has a unique style. They copy off each other all the time). You’re also saying that furry artists should have a right to their livelihood, which is also not the case. Civilization changes over time, new technologies and new social movements come along and result in jobs coming and going. Nobody has the right to make a living at some particular career.

You say “A core furry experience is getting art commissioned of your character from other artists.” Well, maybe that was a core furry experience. But the times they are a-changing. My avatar image here on the Fediverse was generated by me in large part by AI art generators and I got a much better experience and a much more accurate reflection of what I was going for than I would have got via a commission, and I got it for free. That sucks for the artists but it’s great for everyone else.

And while there are some comparisons you could draw from that situation, photography didn’t fundamentally replace their work verbatim, it merely provided an alternative that filled a similar role.

Does AI art actually replace an artist’s work verbatim? When I made my avatar image I still did a lot of intermediate fiddling steps in the Gimp. AI is just part of my workflow. An artist could also make use of it. Or they could continue making art the old fashioned way if they want, the mere existence of AI art generators doesn’t affect that ability one whit. All it does is change the market, possibly making it so that they can no longer make a living at their old job.

There are still plenty of painters. But when photography came along there were probably a lot of portrait painters who were put out of work. Over the years I’ve had several family photographs taken in photography studios, but I’ve never even considered commissioning a painter to paint a portrait of myself.

Ultimately the models themselves don’t contain any copyrighted content

And that’s that for basically all the anti-AI legal arguments.

but they (by design) combine related ideas and patterns found in the training data, in a way that will always approximate it, depending on the depth of training data

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. People do it all the time, why is it suddenly a huge moral problem when a machine does? Should it be illegal for someone to go to a furry artist and ask for something “in the style of Dark Natasha”, or for an artist to pick up some of his personal style from Jay Naylor’s work?

I want to publicly express the notion that it’s not a silver bullet, and we need to develop legal frameworks for protecting people now, rather than later.

I actually agree, but the people that I think are most in need of protecting are the people who train and use AI models. There are tons of news stories and personal experiences being posted these days about these people being persecuted in various ways, deplatformed, lied about, and so forth. They’re the ones whose rights people are proposing should be restricted.