Presumably the artist is a human who directly or indirectly paid money to view a film containing an archaeologist with the whip.

I don't think this is about reproduction as much as how you got enough data for that reproduction. The riaa sent people to jail and ruined their lives for pirating. Now these companies are doing it and being valued for hundreds of billions of dollars.

You're right, it's not just about reproduction, it's about how the data was collected

Plus the scale of it all.

A human friend can get tired and there's so many request he/she can fulfill and at a max rate. Even a team of human artists have a relatively low limit.

But Gen AI has very high limits and speeds, and it never gets tired. It seems unfair to me.