I’ve also heard this argument in the context of copyright. Copyright is not necessary for creativity to happen. Artists are going to art whether or not they get paid for it. The difference is that we, as a society, want artists to be able to live well while dedicating themselves to making art.

The problem with copyright is that it has been weaponized by moneyed interests in a way that often means we get less art, rather than more.

Fan art is incredibly common, and before copyright it was one of the main sources of all art. Almost all the tales of King Arthur are basically fan art. People would take the King Arthur setting and characters and tell their own stories involving those characters. But, in the modern world, copyright law gives companies a way to stop people from telling fan-art stories. As Cory Doctorow has said, at this point adding more copyright protection is basically like giving a bullied kid more lunch money. It’s just going to be passed on to the bullies.

So, now we have a situation where copyright is a pretty shitty tool to help artists because it has mostly been turned into a weapon for corporations to use against artists. Meanwhile, we have “AI” that essentially ignores or bypasses copyright to create “derivative” works that look or sound like the works of certain artists, but where they don’t even get the meagre pennies they get under the old copyright system.

I think we’ve really been at a “burn it all down and start over” phase for a while now, when it comes to how to encourage artists to create art.