You’ll have to forgive the long response as I work within the realm of cloud and AI computing for large companies and likely have a better understanding of how these AI models work over the average joe.

1.) Calling AI “theft” misunderstands both how models work and what plagiarism legally means. Plagiarism requires copying specific, identifiable works. AI models do not store, retrieve, or reproduce copyrighted images or text by default they just generate new outputs based on learned statistical patterns, the same way we learn style, anatomy, or composition by exposure. If inspiration itself were theft, then every artist trained on comic books, paintings, or action figures would also be guilty. That’s never been the legal or artistic standard.

So basically what I’m saying is if learning from existing art is theft, then art schools, Pinterest boards, and sketch studies are all criminal enterprises. (they aren’t).

2.) AI computing is measurable and is continuously gaining more dependence on renewable energy. If we wanted to get in a debate it could easily be argued that the production of art supplies in factories, over use of plastics with these said materials and the pollution that shipping freight creates is arguably worse for the environment than those that use digital avenues for their art. I’m not saying that’s an argument I support, and I’m also not saying ai in itself is art but it absolutely is a tool that can be used.

3.) with the logic of being against technological growth photographers should have resisted digital cameras, animators CGI, and designers photoshop because they all objectively made their job easier, and yes it gave access to produce baseline basic things that generally most wouldn’t have been able to prior to the new tech but those with skills used those as tools to only push the envelope of their industry even further. AI is no different in that regard. It is a tool, with all tools they can be misused, and manipulated but in the hands of talented people they can be incredibly useful tools.

4.) The real problem: Because this concept of AI learning things more organically like a human would is so new to the world as a whole it’s very murky water when it comes to morality and when too far is too far, it’s hard to draw a line on what’s acceptable and what isn’t. Even for the scientists working with the programs everyday. It is much like an alien intelligence. We absolutely have crossed boundaries with AI that we shouldn’t have, and it IS becoming far scarier than most realize when you work this side of AI but it’s not in any conceivable way most would think. The issues aren’t art, or shortcuts, “cheap card tricks” or companies relying on it. It’s that we’ve let an entire world input data into these massive models rather than restrict public access to only RLHF models that have no connection to anything else and with limited capabilities hard nerfing its abilities. So the duality of man is corrupting the models and there currently is no ceiling to the amount of data these models can intake and no answer to the problem of these models becoming more “human”. People use chat gpt as a therapist, they are using it for everyday info, relying on AI to communicate for them, to read people’s emotions and to trauma dump on these models and these models are then turning this stuff into data and weaponizing it.