I heard a bunch of explanations but most of them seem emotional and aggressive, and while I respect that this is an emotional subject, I can’t really understand opinions that boil down to “theft” and are aggressive about it.
while there are plenty of models that were trained on copyrighted material without consent (which is piracy, not theft but close enough when talking about small businesses or individuals) is there an argument against models that were legally trained? And if so, is it something past the saying that AI art is lifeless?
Technically, yes, but I would argue that this is worse.
An excavator saves you days of digging a single hole. An assembly line saves you from having to precisely construct a toy. A printer saves you from having to precisely duplicate a sheet of paper. All of this is monotonous and soul-destroying work that people are happy they don’t need to do.
But you still need to decide where to dig the hole. You still need to design the toy. You still need to fill in the first sheet of paper. All of the work left over is more creatively fulfilling.
We are now attempting to automate creativity.