If an artist wanted to prevent either humans or AI from being inspired without paying them, they should put their content behind a paywall.

That’s not how the law (or the Internet) works currently though. They can license its usage, and also there are automatic copyright protections given by the law as well.

Now, what Congress does with the existing laws in the future is fair game, and another thing altogether.

I feel that copyright should apply to copying material, not learning from it to make your own.

An interesting technical legal point to argue would be that if an AI model-making corporation copies the content to their servers hard drives before having their model read/study it from said hard drives, vs. having the model ‘see’ it directly from the source material in real time, like how a human being does it. 🤔

As it is now, the content is copied first, then used later, so per your own definition it would be covered by copyright (assuming its not already explicitly licensed otherwise). Again, IANAL. 🙂

_{Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)}