"ip unfairly owned by giant corporations" is not, and never has been, the defense for fanfic. i mean sure, disney, the corporate entity, owns star wars, and might get litigious about it, despite it being a monolith of a company that didn't "create" anything.
but what about the anne rices of the world? she created The Vampire Chronicles, fair and square. no big scary corporate entity stole it from her. should we purge all the gay fanfic, with a, "oh no, i'm so sorry i didn't realize you said no?" what about all the game of thrones fic, do we delete all that too? George R R Martin certainly doesn't think there's a difference between "intellectual property" and "individual works."
there are plenty of creators that HATE fanfiction and are willing to use the law to see it destroyed. it doesn't MATTER if they created the original IP and don't want anyone else to touch it. once you put art out into the world, you don't have the right to control the conversation about it, for better or for worse.
and ai is certainly not just reposting the "individual works" it's drawing from. it's just not. you can't ask it to reproduce something and get access to it in its entirety, or even in substantially large part. which is the ONLY place we currently draw the line between plagiarism and fanworks. if the AI creations are notably different than the original "individual works," (which they ARE), there is no distinction you can make between AI works and fanworks on a copyright level, no matter what you THINK is going on deep in the bot's servers.
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