No. AI is usually generated from an image database. The images have copyrights so legally you can not sell AI art unless you have permission from the artists you are using as references. Similar that you can’t just sample a bunch of songs and try to sell your song as being original. I would not be surprised if there is more talk about AI and copyright laws in the following years.
Um...no, it can't.
I used Midjourney AI for two book covers - the books in question had sat on my hard drive for around 20 years, and I was publishing them with no budget as a "wouldn't it be nice if somebody had the chance to read this" instead of as a "tentpole" release. So, what I was able to get after a fair amount of effort was something serviceable, but also very general. So, here is AI art generated by Midjourney:
So, you get a general figure on an ice field. Happily, in this version, he has two legs (I'm not being facetious here - most of the generated art either had one leg or three). There is no real character design, and there isn't any real customization either. The image was generated and regenerated until something worked. It is good enough, but nothing more.
(And to correct the misinformation about copyright from a certain other poster, if the AI is doing a direct copy and paste from an image, then there may be a violation of copyright, if a distinct new work is not created. If it is generating an image using an algorithm drawing upon works of prior art but not copying and pasting - essentially, generating a new image in a certain style - there is no infringement. Copyright only protects specific implementations of a work, and the right for somebody else to create derivations of that work is protected in international law under Article 2(3) of the Berne Convention, which states "Translations, adaptations, arrangements of music and other alterations of a literary or artistic work shall be protected as original works without prejudice to the copyright in the original work.")
In comparison, an artist can provide a level of customization and character design that no AI could ever match. An artist can respond to feedback, and make sure that what you get is an actual representation of your work, and not just a random representation that is close enough. So, for comparison, here is the cover of the second Re:Apotheosis book:
What you are seeing are the actual characters appearing in the book overlaid over the background of a scene from The Odyssey of Daiki Yamato in which an information stream is creating a new story world. An AI would not be able to do this. An artist can.
So, there is a place for AI art (if you have no money to dedicate to a book cover and you need something good enough, Midjourney will do the trick), and I think as time goes on it will probably join the toolkit of the digital artist for things like rendering backgrounds (mountains, cityscapes, etc.). But, it cannot replace an actual artist, and if you can hire one, you should.
In fact, I would put it this way - if you have the money available, HIRE A F--KING ARTIST!
- Even if it can, it wouldn't. Art, first and foremost, is you expressing yourself and existence of AI can't take that away.
- Cowboy Bebop becoming a reality and people terraforming Mars
I could say "hey, I watched anime about it when I was little! " And my grandgrandkids will be like 
But if your derivation gets too close to the original design, you could be in for legal problems. Disney & other businesses will jealously prosecute works that "might be mistaken for" theirs.
I suppose we'd say that the art AI was sort of "inspired" by the works it analyzed to create something new. As long as the AI doesn't replicate a chunk of the original work it should be clear of copyright problems. But a lot of artists are having conniptions over AIs using their works to generate "art". Are they seeing chunks of their originals getting reused? I just hear the rumblings but not a lot of specific violations (yet).
I kind of think the answer depends on what you mean by "replace".
If AI art sells more works than human artists, is that replacing them? It could be deemed so, in a marketplace sense.
If AIs became capable of looking at a scene & rendering it in the same way a human would paint or draw it, is that replacing them? It could be deemed so in the sense of replacing capabilities.
Also, the claim is sort of open-ended. Can they now? Or can some future improved AI do so? Who can say for sure when we know little about how AI will develop?
That's trademark, not copyright. There is a difference, part of which is that trademarks have to be defended or a court can declare them to be abandoned (a thing that does not happen with copyrights). So yeah...don't try to pass off a copy of Mickey Mouse as your own.
From what I understand, it depends on the AI. There are AIs that will literally take "cat from picture X" and "background from picture Y" and just mash them together, which probably is transformative enough, but probably also really shouldn't be. Then you have something like Midjourney, which will literally generate the art in front of you as you watch (and this is amazingly cool), generate variations, etc. I don't think a Midjourney picture would ever cross the line into infringement unless somebody actually told it to draw Mickey Mouse (which is why I was comfortable using it for the two covers I did).
I'm going with a hard "no" on this one.
I've seen these sorts of moral panics before. Supposedly, back when photography became available to the masses, there was a panic that photographs would replace art. It didn't. I'm far too young to have seen that one, but I do remember the whole "e-books have made print books obsolete and will replace them" - that didn't happen either. Instead, each new technology found its niche.
I think AI art is here to stay, but if artists could be so easily replaced by free/low cost options, it would have happened years ago. The existence of large archives of public domain art hasn't replaced the artist, and neither will AI art. As I said in a previous post, there's a very high possibility that AI art will be folded into the toolbox of the digital artist, and it will probably be used by people just starting out in publishing who don't have the money for an actual artist. But, what an artist can do in regards to working with a client cannot be replaced. It's the difference between having your characters on the cover and having a good enough approximation of a person who could be one of your characters on the cover. One will always be better than the other.
Here is the problem with AI art. You only see one picture. Never a sequence of pictures telling an actual story. How do you explain a med shot to a AI. Or a any of the other shots used in comics and storyboards. And how is it going to follow a script. So yes AI will be able to replace static shots in the future if you are picky about the outcome. There is too much of the small things computers don't get and for the foreseeable future will not get.
By the way, its not really AI. its just a computer compiling images. It actually doesn't understand what those images are or what they represent. The smartest computer is actually dumber than an insect when it comes to this.
Good point. It's my understanding that Disney characters are covered by copyrights, though. Is that incorrect? I understand trademarks can become lost if not defended (a travesty of its own) & copyrights are lost due to passage of time.
That jives with & clarifies the remarks I'd read from artists on Deviant Art, etc. There seems to be a long running argument (mostly among non-lawyers) as to whether copy-pasting bits from here & there into a composite are really copyright violations. Also whether an original work can be copied & edited to a degree that it's not a copyright violation. I've had at least one legally-trained person opine that both processes are violations no matter how much tinkering is done to the original pixels.
To a degree, they're covered by both. I now have to say that I am not a lawyer, although I have been a legal researcher, and my expertise comes from experience in publishing and should not be considered legal advice. So, Steamboat Willie and the Mickey Mouse who appears is covered by copyright. However, Mickey Mouse, the character used for commerce and as a mascot by Disney, is covered by trademark. This means that in a few years, the version of the character who appeared in Steamboat Willie will be in the public domain, but the Disney mascot will covered under trademark.
The question is whether it is transformative. If I was to start with somebody's character (such as Altair from Re:Creators) and use them as a writing prompt, creating a new character with a similar yet modified back story but different personality (now named Aquila) this is transformative and thus a derivative work. Aquila has the DNA of Altair inside her, but she is a new character with her own personality and character arc.
(And yes, this is a real example, and everybody gets to meet her in mid-December.)
To bring that to AI art with copying and pasting, if you just take a person from one picture and put them on a new background, then it probably isn't transformative enough to count as a derivative work - it's still that same person. If you take this person, replace their head with a toaster, and call them "Toaster Head the Great," this would be transformative, and thus a derivative work. It is no longer the same person, and all of the elements (body, toaster, background) have been used to create something new.
EDIT: Hopefully that makes sense.
Yes, that all makes sense & I thank you for taking the time to share your understanding of it. If we were lawyers, we'd be billing everyone for our comments here! LOL
I hear that A.I art can replace human artists, is this true?
No
If you live to 100 years old, what would you expect to see?
AI ruling the world
New question:
3) What would happen to the world if we discover anti aging drug? (Only prevent people from dying of old age, people still die because of accidents and deadly diseases).
It will be really expensive and only a few people can effort it so it will not really effect the rest of the world
It would be hoarded by the wealthy and they would dangle it above the heads of the plebeians as a way to keep them in line.
That would be a great idea for a story, of how people control each other and about the true meaning of life 
It would affect society greatly and imagine the gap between rich and poor gets even bigger than it is now,
the recources run out, most of the planet is uninhabitable. A few people survive while everyone else
suffers and dies and they have the antiaging drug and the control over the recources
I have a theory that people will shut themselves inside the house because now they know they can live forever, taking risk become more frightful. Is this a possibility?
There is and I think people spend more time in the house in general, in the future people will
spend even more time at home to avoid other people
Another cool topic
In the future, perhaps A.I will do all basic works, even creative works, and human task is only to control or fix all the A.I. Because logical thinking is already A.I job, then human will develop some kind of erratic thinking? How can we educate our children then?
