I don't think most artists would be any less angry & scared if AI was trained on licensed work. The rhetoric would just shift from mostly "they're breashing copyright!" to more of the "machine art is soulless and lacks true human creativity!" line.

I have a lot of artist friends but I still appreciate that diffusion models are (and will be with further refinement) incredibly useful tools.

What we're seeing is just the commoditisation of an industry in the same way that we have many, many times before through the industrial era, etc.

I get where you're coming from, but given that LLMs are trained on every available written word regardless of license, there's no meaningful distinction. Companies training LLMs for programming and writing show the same disregard for copyright as they do for graphic design. Therefore, graphic designers aren't owed special consideration that the author is unwilling to extend to anybody else.

FWIW Adobe makes a lot of noise about how their specific models were indeed trained on only licensed work. Not sure if that really matters however

I like this argument, but it does somewhat apply to software development as well! The only real difference is that the bulk of the "licensed work" the LLMs are consuming to learn to generate code happened to use some open source license that didn't specifically exclude use of the code as training data for an AI.

For some of the free-er licenses this might mostly be just a lack-of-attribution issue, but in the case of some stronger licenses like GPL/AGPL, I'd argue that training a commercial AI codegen tool (which is then used to generate commercial closed-source code) on licensed code is against the spirit of the license, even if it's not against the letter of the license (probably mostly because the license authors didn't predict this future we live in).

Does it? It admits at the top that art is special for no given reason, then it claims that programmers don't care about copyright and they deserve what's coming to them, or something..

"Artificial intelligence is profoundly — and probably unfairly — threatening to visual artists"

This feels asserted without any real evidence