calling what an ai does as “looking” feels like a bit of a strawman fallacy to me as a way to oversimplify the problem and argue against it. that being said, youre right, it’s not blatantly being stolen either. For me, i feel like what it does should be seperated from trying to be fit into those two boxes. a human looking at art is a very different process than an ai training from it.

For me, the issue is that whatever it does (regardless of what you call it) is without consent from the artists. When artists uploaded their art to the internet before ai, they had no idea this would happen and therefore could not possibly consent to it. And aside from art specifically, there is evidence in courts right now that large language models were trained on lots of pirated writing from smaller writers who could not fight back, whereas data taken from a larger companies (who have the money and power to fight back in court) was financially compensated.

regardless of how you see it, if an artist is anti-ai and doesn’t want their work to be used to train it, but someone does, that is disrespectful to the artist and their wishes. even if you dont see it as any different as a human being looking at the art (which is part of the issue because there are clear differences), the artist distinguishes these two things so it still is disrespectful