> but what the customers of AI people want isn't available under those terms.
What the customers of AI want is accurate predictions of the models, and they can get that even if everyone demanding to get removed from the training set would be removed.
The makers of generative AI could remove every living artist who wants to from the dataset, the model would still develop a general solution of color theory, composition, almost every artstyle in existence, ... because fact of the matter is, there is just that much data out there. Our species collectively has spend DECADES recording, storing and categorizing everything and the proverbial kitchen sink. There are god-knows-how-many petabytes of data available in images alone, so even if just 1% of that could be used to train generative models, it would still be more than adequate.
And soon after that, there is an explosion of new generated art, filtered through the aesthetic sense of millions of humans, that can just be fed back into the models, to make them better.
The end result is the same: High-quality image generation on a scale hitherto unseen, running even on consumer grade hardware. And what lawsuits will be filed then?