We might be able to argue that the computer program taking art as input and automatically generating art as output is the exact same as an artist some time after general intelligence is reached, until then, it's still a machine transformation and should be treated as such.
AI shouldn't be a legal avenue for copyright laundering.
I really doubt that AI will somehow be our successors. Machines and AI need microprocessors so complex that it took us 70 years of exponential growth and multiple trillion-dollar tech companies to train even these frankly quite unimpressive models. These AI are entirely dependent on our globalized value chains with capital costs so high that there are multiple points of failure.
A human needs just food, clean water, a warm environment and some books to carry civilization forward.