> Fame has a very short half-life and unless you have all the licensing/contractual machinery in place beforehand, you probably won't be able to cash on that boost.

I'm not sure how did you manage to miss thousands of artists able to capitalize on sudden and accidental fame for decades without any prior arrangements. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm saying it's possible. Also to put this in context compare this with how often very popular artists get completely screwed by huge copyright behemoths earning a score of money but mostly for someone else, someone completely uncreative.

> https://theoatmeal.com/comics/exposure

Trying to buy something for exposure is absolutely abhorrent because you try to coax someone into doing work for no money. And for nothing basically because people who try to pay with exposure don't really provide any significant exposure 99.99% of times.

If AI people were forcing artist to create new art and paying them with the promise of exposure in their generated works I'll be completely on your side. However it requires zero work from artist to have their already published work to be used as learning material. That's why they never opposed it when other artists were learning from their art. That and of course that target of their wrath would be basically the entire rest of the art community which wouldn't make them very popular.

> Suppose you have a distinctive visual style that's a great fit with a genre, like ghost stories. .... I never gave you credit and in their mind the style is associated with Best Daily Ghost Stories, not you.

That's completely fine in my book. And if those generated stories get really popular so I learn about them I might do just a little bit of online marketing to inject my name in the discussions about them and publish new ones to my fresh new subscribers ahead of time. Heck, I could create my own generated and fine-tuned manually content and sell it just like that guy does since he's already proven a business model for me.

Compare now this with the world of strict copyright where this guy doesn't even know I exist, same goes for swaths of fans of ghost stories. Or let's assume he knows and wants to deal with me. Since he's the one with the money I'll be severely dependent of him and strongly disadvantaged in any deal. But let's assume we struck a deal that's nice for me. There's no way I'll be able to produce new ghost stories every day. Not to mention I wouldn't wish that workload on my worst enemy. So no business happens and many people have their love for ghost stories un-satiated, many didn't discover their love for ghost stories and I am 100% still poor struggling author who's known by nobody.

World without copyright and zero publishing cost is the one where authors and consumers are in control and negotiate through attention economy. World of copyright is the world where copyright hoarding dragon starve both artists and consumers.

> The dirty secret of the creative industries is that if you don't get paid up front for your contribution, you will probably never get paid at all.

And yet you vehemently defend the system that created this situation and refuse to even consider alternatives.