Isabelle Levent

If it was possible to deduce how much of an influence each individual image has on the final outcome (and the owner of each image was known and labelled, which I currently doubt happens), would it be simple to compensate people then?

Academically, this is a collision of everything from computer science and art history to media studies to disruptive innovation to labor economics, and no one of these disciplines seems sufficient to cover the topic. 

New art-making technologies change art in consistent ways, and studying the past helps us understand how things will change in the future.

Many methods for creating these models don't (and to be honest can't) attach the name, website and other details of every image and piece of text used to a create a new image in the metadata to every step of the process.

Second, we should create a legal regime that can make our data’s collective value something we can bargain over as a group.

Whatever the size of the space, someone who comes up with a new idea within that thinking-style is being creative in the second, exploratory, sense. If the new idea is surprising not just in itself but as an example of an unexpected general  type , so much the better.