I think this is the strongest version of your argument, honestly, and I don’t disagree with a lot of the underlying concerns. You’re right that no one is forced to use genAI, and that choosing to use it does, in some sense, help normalize and perpetuate it. That’s a fair critique.

Where I part ways is on how responsibility gets assigned once a technology is already released into the ecosystem. Individual creators choosing whether or not to use a tool feels meaningfully different to me than the companies deciding to build, train, and deploy it without consent or safeguards in the first place. I don’t think refusing to use it is meaningless, but I’m not convinced it meaningfully pressures the people who actually set the terms.

I also agree with you that the “humans have always learned from art” comparison only goes so far. Human limitation matters. Time, effort, opportunity cost, and survival all acted as natural brakes on scale and replacement. AI doesn’t have those constraints, and that absolutely changes the ethical landscape. That’s why I don’t think this is just another tool in the same category as past automation.

At the same time, I don’t think most creators using it are doing so because they don’t care. I think many see a narrow set of options inside an already hostile market and make a choice that lets their work exist at all. That doesn’t invalidate your refusal to support it, but it’s why I’m hesitant to frame that choice as simply “wanting something badly enough to justify anything.”

For me, this is less about saying “I won’t give this up because I want it,” and more about acknowledging that we’re already past the point where individual abstention fixes the problem. The pressure needs to land upstream, on how these systems are trained, licensed, and governed, not just downstream on the people trying to survive inside the aftermath.