Whether or not it is superficially similar, the barrier to entry and the upper ceiling for infringement have both drastically changed overnight.
AI is not an independent entity that has entered the game, it is (currently) a power to be wielded by anyone regardless of their background. It can only be used as ethically as the person sitting at the keyboard, who most likely does not have a sufficient understanding of the underlying systems to make an informed decision (I suspect that if using the AI software involved the end-user feeding images into the model as a prerequisite step, they might have better intuitions about how to understand the implications of the images they generate from the resulting model).
> so nothing really changes for the "ethically sensitive" use-cases.
I think the thing that changes is the whole playing field. When overnight, anyone with a recent iPhone can generate highly sophisticated art/images with no artistic practice/training, it seems hard to argue that nothing has changed.
Before AI, even with the constraints of human capability, the art world was full of stories of stealing and bad behavior. Some blatant, some ethically questionable but thought provoking, etc. For all of their promise, the tools at hand have the ability to grow that kind of misuse at unprecedented scale.
What it even means to exist in an "ethically sensitive" framework likely needs to change. Or at the very least, current thinking needs to be examined to determine if it still makes sense in light of these new tools.
