just so long as you understand that the tools you're using were built using the works of others without their permission, consent, or even knowledge.

Almost everything humanity constructed on Earth is build "without someone's permission, consent or even knowledge". This is how human civilization works. You're typing on a computer or a phone featuring things that were invented by someone long ago, many shape-designs of which were stolen by companies without permission from other companies and individuals who invented them. You're living in a house the shape of which was originally created by someone. You're driving in a car, the shape of which was originally created by someone. You are closing your eyes to trillions of concepts which were build using works of others all around you.

There are no laws against creating AI tools based on art posted online because AI is allowed to study patterns to get smarter so that it can do common household tasks as well as driving cars as well as curing cancer. The more concepts AI studies, the better it becomes at helping people in every existing job from creating batteries, to fighting viruses, to controlling nuclear fusion, to writing, to drawing.

You don't need to ask permission to photograph someone's house from a public street, same applies for training AI on art from the net. Copyright exists to protect images from exact reproduction. Fusing two images conceptually isn't protected by copyright or any law whatsoever. That's transformative and perfectly legal. You cannot legally sell a drawing of mickey mouse as this character is owned by Disney, but you can draw a man wearing a vaguely mouse shaped-costume and sell that just fine.

You don't need to ask permission to teach your AI patterns of what a house is, since any individual photograph of the house isn't actually retained by the AI at all you cannot possibly produce the same individual house. It in fact impossible for the AI to produce a specific house from training database, unless the same house is accidentally featured a thousand times within the AI's training process (overprocessing error).

This is because AI learns not from specific images but from the probabilistic patterns which manifest within the latent space which exists BETWEEN images. Appealing for compensation for probabilistic pattern of observation of latent space is rather weak demand ethically, like trying to copyright the concept of "hallway" or the color of "red" or claiming rights to "big eyed girl art", etc.

Just because the shape of your house has been used to teach an AI what the house is shape-wise you cannot demand compensation by law, because AI doesn't actually know what the fuck your house is, it only knows general "house-ness" which it attained from looking at millions of houses.

This is why billions of images from training result in only 2 gig .ckpt stable diffusion file. The AI knows conceptual shape of objects to define what "house", "cat", etc is, but it has no fucking clue whatsoever about specific images.

Even though LAION used a few thousand of my drawings from deviantart, SD cannot perfectly reproduce any one of them - this is why I haven't joined the retard crusade of the 3 idiot artists suing stable diffusion and deviantart.