Everything about this entire situation is comically dumb, but shows how far the US has degraded, that this is meaningful news. If this were a fiction book, people would dismiss it as being lazy writing - an ultra conservative CEO of a pillow company spreads voting conspiracies leading to a lawsuit in which they hire lawyers that risk losing the case because they relied on AI.
Quite dumb. If it were a book it would be "Infinite Jest", and the receipts of everyone who bought the pillows could be used to enter into some inane raffle.
This is not at all true. Some percentage of AI generated images might have become a contract, but that percentage is vanishingly small.
Most AI generated images you see out there are just shared casually between friends. Another sizable chunk are useless filler in a casual blog post and the author would otherwise have gone without, used public domain images, or illegally copied an image.
A very very small percentage of them are used in a specific subset of SEO posts whose authors actually might have cared enough to get a professional illustrator a few years ago but don't care enough to avoid AI artifacts today. That sliver probably represents most of the work that used to exist for a freelance illustrator, but it's a vanishingly small percentage of AI generated images.
I prefer to get my illegally copied images from only the most humanely trained LLM instead of illegally copying them myself like some neanderthal or, heaven forbid, asking a human to make something. Such a though is revolting; humans breathe so loud and sweat so much and are so icky. Hold on - my wife just texted me. "Hey chat gipity, what is my wife asking about now?" /s