It actually is.
It shows that we as a society are completely OK with this, and nobody is complaining about a very standard and common thing that all artists do.
It shows that the outrage is fake, and people don't actually care about the issue.
And yes, obviously society cares about many things depending on the scales in question. It's okay if a dude goes onto a lake on his small rowboat and catches a few fish for dinner, it's a completely different story if you're talking about a massive barge indiscriminately catching literally thousands of fish with huge nets. The latter has to adhere to much stricter rules than the prior, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks these 2 situations should be treated equally (unless you're a commercial fisherman with a barge, I suppose, the quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." comes to mind here)
In the history of the world only a single person has ever drawn fan art?
No, I don't think that's the case.
Instead it is widespread. It is everywhere.
> depending on the scales in question
The scale argument supports me, not you.
This type of "infringement" is everywhere.
> reselling it for their own profit with no regards to anyone or anything else?
Even this is common. The online independent artist commissions market is full of people doing commercial fan art commissions.
Thinking about this even more, I am now wondering if "infringing" works might actually be a majority of the online/independent commissions market. Maybe.
And yet, nobody cares.
That's a disingenuous take of my comment at best, the equivalent to my scenario is a bunch of unrelated individuals with small boats going out into whatever lake is nearest to them and fishing. Even if you put all of them together and counted how many fish the hobby fishermen catch, it's still nowhere near the scale of the commercial fisheries, which is why they're treated differently both by society at larger but also legally.
Same thing with these AI models, Dall-E and all the other ones have probably generated more images than all of humanity has in its entire history so far, and if not quite yet they're definitely gonna get there sooner rather than later. They can generate dozens if not hundreds of images in a split second, whereas a single artist (or even many artists collectively) can't.
> And yet, nobody cares.
I think we've already established that, because scales absolutely matter for most things. If you want to be an absolutist about it, sure be my guest, but I think in reality the large majority of people are fine when your average Joe Schmoe the artist makes a commission on a random Disney character, whereas they definitely would NOT be okay with a massive conglomerate like Disney stealing Joe Schmoe's original art and repurposing it without compensating Joe, because there's an inherent power disbalance between the two and the consequences of that power disparity matters.
I mean, Disney does have every right to go after Joe for his commissions if they really wanted to, similarly to how Nintendo is hyper aggressive with taking down anything relating to their IPs. It's just not really worth it for most companies, they will absolutely go for another company trying to pull the same shit though, as can be seen with the NYT case.
And OpenAI quite literally sells access to their models, and if those models are pushing out verbatim copyrighted works as has been alleged by the NYT, then they are by definition reselling copyrighted works without permission.
This style of argument has been previously made regarding things like torrenting during the heyday of piracy ("why would you need <x> except for illegal purposes!")
In my opinion, it's the exact same argument saying that selling a tool means taking responsibility for how that tool is used by its new owner. You can use a shovel to both create something new (plant a tree) or destroy something (rip up your neighbor's garden).
The problem isn't the tool, the problem is how the end user uses it. These models aren't living thinking entities that enduce or on their own infringe copyright / do other illegal activities.
They aren't encouraging people to misuse them and it is solely on the user's shoulders for their choice to use them in a way that would cause infringement if the result is used commercially.
If you sold the output of a true random number generator, eventually you'd also by definition be reselling copyrighted works without permission. The courts wouldn't mindlessly say "no more random numbers", and I doubt that they'll do the same for GenAI, especially given the recent decisions that are headed that way.
Instead, it is a person who uses the machine, just like fan artists can use a computer to make fan art.
A machine being involved in the process doesn't change any of the copyright implications.
Either it's infringement or it isn't, regardless if the human did it on their own, or if the human did it with a computer.
The interesting question is whether the models themselves are copyright violations not the output.
Society is effectively ok with you ripping me off for $1. They are not when it's $100k.
