I've been wondering why this argument's not been sitting with me, and I think it's for the same reason that the courts have ruled that the FBI needed a warrant to put a tracker on someone's car, as opposed to following someone - the scale of action enabled is the differentiator.
A student learning from other artists is still limited in their output to human-scale - they must physically create the new thing. An AI model is not - the difference between a student learning from an artist and an AI model doing so is the AI model can flood the market with knockoffs at a magnitude the student cannot meet. Similarly, the AI model can simultaneously learn from and mimic the entirety of the art community, where the student has to focus and take time.
If this weren't capitalism - if artists weren't literally reliant on their art to eat, and if the market captured by the AI model didn't inevitably consolidate wealth - then we might be able to ignore that, but we do, and we can't ignore the economic effects when we consider scale like this.
I do agree with you, but honestly I don't even think that's the biggest problem with these arguments.
I'm just sitting here wondering why it is even relevant whether the "AI" is "copying", "learning", "thinking", or whatever, why is any of that important? Does AI have human rights? Well, perhaps in a couple hundred years, if humanity manages not to self-extinguish by then.
It's not like you can sue AI if you think it plagiarized your work, no. Obviously not, so why the hell are we discussing that? "AI" is just a piece of software, a tool, it doesn't matter what it's doing, what matters is what the user is doing, the fact of the matter is that these multi-billionaire corporations are taking everyone's honest work, putting it into a computer, and selling the output. They didn't do any "learning", they just used your data and made money out of it, it isn't a stretch to say they simply sold your work.
EDIT: Perhaps one day the day AI will have human rights, make its own money, and pay bills. That will be the day any of this nonsensical discussion will be anything but useless.
> these multi-billionaire corporations are taking everyone's honest work, putting it into a computer, and selling the output
And then there's the tens of thousands of people training models and making them freely available to everyone. What I fear most is that regulations introduced "to stop" the multi-billionaire corporations will in fact make sure they're the only ones with the resources to comply with the regulations.
I'm not arguing for nor against regulations, I'm simply commenting on the whole "well, it's technically not stealing, therefore it is OK" debacle, all that means is that legally speaking, it's OK, that doesn't make it ethical.
A student learning from other artists is still limited in their output to human-scale - they must physically create the new thing. An AI model is not - the difference between a student learning from an artist and an AI model doing so is the AI model can flood the market with knockoffs at a magnitude the student cannot meet. Similarly, the AI model can simultaneously learn from and mimic the entirety of the art community, where the student has to focus and take time.
If this weren't capitalism - if artists weren't literally reliant on their art to eat, and if the market captured by the AI model didn't inevitably consolidate wealth - then we might be able to ignore that, but we do, and we can't ignore the economic effects when we consider scale like this.