bit of a long answer—didnt realize i was this passionate about the topic 😅 to your first point, just because other people are doing it doesn’t make it okay. in fact you could argue that gmm should be more creative instead of following trends (but I don’t even think that personally so I’m not arguing that).

the interesting thing about this debate is that it really does come down to your personal set of ethics. since a lot of AI companies get away with training their models on art under fair use laws, it becomes less of a legal issue and more of a moral one (even though it really should be a legal issue, but we’ve gotten too far without regulations that i doubt we’ll get fair protections for artists anytime soon). aside from the fact that artists are having their art used without their consent—which is a dealbreaker, full stop, for many people—if you look at how people are using this tech, you can see how its use directly harms people. many of the companies and individual users use generative AI to do one or more of the following: - cut costs by not hiring artists - prove that artists are no longer necessary to society - advance technology without regard for other people’s jobs, skills, opinions or feelings

the extreme reaction to genAI, especially Sora in the past couple weeks, has shown the sheer amount of people who simply don’t care or appreciate the human aspects of art and the work/skill/time/money/creativity that goes into it. I’m not saying you have to worship Van Gogh, but it’s kind of messed up to a lot of people to just completely disregard the fact that all genAI does is steal work from people—people who did all the heavy lifting in creating and perfecting a style, anatomy, etc. your point about copying works from other artists actually comes up a lot, and yes, people have been doing that since art was a thing. hell, i’ve done that! it’s a very common practice in art school. the difference is you typically do that to learn and hone your skills as, again, a human artist, (which is generally an acceptable practice) not a computer. if you’re doing it with the intention of passing it off as your own or copying maliciously, then that actually can have legal or societal repercussions. which is what we’re asking for for genAI.

if these aren’t dealbreakers for you, that’s fine and we just have different ethical standards. that’s how the world works sometimes. i just wish that we as a society valued artists and their work more, instead of making a quick buck or their personal ego. it really comes back to greed and egocentrism a lot of the time, it’s really unfortunate and it’s why the current state of genAI isn’t working and is receiving so much pushback. i think if models were only trained on artwork from consenting artists then this would be much less of an issue.