You can make art using AI. I've seen artists use it to clean up line art, color, shade, fill in backgrounds, and more. AI is just a tool. Lots of people only use text prompts, which I agree is hardly controlling, but that is only a single way to interact with AI. You can do a lot with these models.
I'm in the same boat. Every time someone reads one of my comments and doesn't pay me for it, that's money out of my pocket. It's a hard life being an internet commenter these days.
One of the reasons I like AI art is that it's pretty settled law that something produced by purely "mechanical" means can't itself have copyright, since copyright requires both originality and a human author.
It seems like a reasonably compromise, the AI was created by hoovering up the commons, so anything it creates should belong to the commons. I expect a lot of lobbying in the future to try and change it though.
And if AI work would be copyrighted by the "prompt artist" then all the artists whose work is in the training set can sue the prompter for profiting of their work without licensing fees. It would be a legal clusterfuck so it was pretty wise to side step the whole issue.
How is he losing millions of dollars? If you're just trying to get into the art fraud money laundering scheme thing then make an NFT and find an idiot. But just the creation of a piece (be it traditional, digital, or "ai") doesn't entitle you to a payout. And if you're just complaining about the dissemination of the piece you asked someone else's computer to generate for you without a kick back link tax, well--that's not how copyright, the internet, or normal human correspondence works.
Ah, good ol' music industry math. "1,000 people downloaded a picture that I created, and I wanted to charge $1,000 a piece, so I lost $1,000,000." In reality of course charging $0.02 would've stopped most sales.
Yeah, articles are including the image because they can. If a judge had instead ruled that AI generated works were copyrightable (and to the prompter, not the designer of the tool, owner of the hardware, or even the tool itself) the end result would be that very few orgs would include his piece instead just opting for generating their own (now copyrightable) image to use as an example. He'd still get nothing, but then significantly fewer people would see his "work."
its probably fictionally calculated like sales are to piracy. just because someone pirated a game/software doesnt mean they would have bought said thing at asking price had the piracy option not existed.