It's a tough balance, for sure. I don't want AI companies to exist in the form they currently are, but we're not getting the genie back into the bottle. Whether the economic hit is worth the freedom and creative rights, that I think citizens deserve, is a matter of democratic choice. It's impossible to ignore the fact that in China or Russia, where citizens don't have much a choice, I don't think artistic rights or the people's wellbeing are even part of the equation. Other countries will need a response when companies from these countries start doing work more efficiently. I myself have been using Bing AI more and more as AI bullcrap is flooding every page of every search engine, fighting AI with AI so to speak.
I saw this whole ordeal coming the moment ChatGPT came out and I had the foolish hope that legislators would've done something by now. The EU's AI Act will apply March next year but it doesn't seem to solve the copyright problem at all. Or rather, it seems to accept the current copyright problem, as the EU's summary put it:
Generative AI, like ChatGPT, will not be classified as high-risk, but will have to comply with transparency requirements and EU copyright law:
Disclosing that the content was generated by AI
Designing the model to prevent it from generating illegal content
Publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training
The EU seems to have chosen to focus on combating the immediate threat of AI abuse, but seem to be very tolerant of AI copyright infringement. I can only presume this is to make sure "innovation" doesn't get impeded too much.
I'll take this into account during the EU vote that's about to happen soon, but I'm afraid it's too late. I wish we could go back and stop AI before it started, but this stuff has happened and now the world is a little bit better and worse.