I think graphic designers would be a lot less angry if AIs were trained on licensed work… thats how the system worked up until now after all.
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.
But there is a reason why nobody cares about Adobe AI and everybody uses midjourney…
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).
"Artificial intelligence is profoundly — and probably unfairly — threatening to visual artists"
This feels asserted without any real evidence
Far more importantly, though, artists haven't spent the last quarter century working to eliminate protections for IPR. Software developers have.
Finally, though I'm not stuck on this: I simply don't agree with the case being made for LLMs violating IPR.
I have had the pleasure, many times over the last 16 years, of expressing my discomfort with nerd piracy culture and the coercive might-makes-right arguments underpinning it. I know how the argument goes over here (like a lead balloon). You can agree with me or disagree. But I've earned my bona fides here. The search bar will avail.
Things like this are expressions of preference. The discussion will typically devolve into restatements of the original preference and appeals to special circumstances.
