The idea of copyright is to protect the financial rights of creatives, thus incentivising people to make more stuff, right?

Well even before AI, it wasn't doing its job very well on that front. The only ones with the power and money to be able to leverage copyright to protect their rights are those who are already so powerful that they don't need those protections — big music labels and the like. Individual creatives were already being fucked over by the system long before AI.

If you haven't read the article, I'd encourage you to give it a try. Or perhaps this one, which goes into depth on the intrinsic tensions within copyright law.

You probably should've because yeah, the way AI companies are treating creative works is disgusting and downright wrong, but copyright law has very much been broken ever since the Internet became a thing. It's just silly to treat works published on the internet the same way you treat books, paintings and DVDs, not to talk about the issue of jurisdiction on an entity that transcends borders . Aside from that, the laws have been "evolving" to the advantage of big "IP holders" and against the public for a century. A copyright being valid for 70/120 years after the death of the author makes no fucking sense. It should be public domain the day after.