What they were however was against was companies using that technology to slash their wages in exchange for being forced to do significantly more dangerous jobs.
In less than a decade, textile work went from a safe job with respectable pay for artisans and craftsmen into one of the most dangerous jobs of the industrialised era with often less than a third of the pay with the workers primarily being children.
That's what the luddites were afraid of. And the government response was military/police intervention, breaking of any and all strikes, and harsh punishments such as execution for damaging company property.
I think artists feeling like shit in this situation is totally understandable. I'm just a dilettante painter and amateur hentai sketcher, but some of the real artists I know are practically in the middle of an existential crisis. Feeling empathy for them is not the same as thinking that we should make futile efforts to halt the progress of this technology.
I'll go so far as to say that in many cases, displaying empathy for the artists without also advocating for futile efforts to halt the progress of this technology will be regarded as a lack of empathy.
You can make sure the people from which their jobs where taken by an AI should be able to live from its proceeds. We all benefit and make progress.
Attaching costs to technology in an effort to make sure the people from which their jobs where taken by an AI should be able to live from its proceeds is going to slow down advancement at best. There's also a real chance that it pushes investment and usage away from the things that get those people paid (such as public domain training materials), meaning that the whole attempt fails and the people lose their jobs anyway without getting paid.
In my opinion, I'm not conflating these two things by accident. I'm looking at how things are likely to be done and considering probable consequences.
There's a very real chance that adding these costs on top will drive development away from the sort that pays the people who lose out. For example, attempting to require licensing for images may simply push model training towards public domain materials. Then the models still work and the usable commercial art is still generated cheaply, but there are no living artists getting paid.
We should not blithely assume an ideal option that makes everyone happy is readily available or even at all. The core incentive of a lot of users is to spend less on commercial imagery. The core incentive of artists is to get paid at least as much as before. We should take seriously the possibility that there is not a medium in there that satisfies everyone.
At the dawn of mechanization, these same arguments were being used by the luddites, I'd recommend you to read them, it was quite an interesting situation, same as now
The reality is that advances such as these can't be stopped, even if you forbid ml legislation in the US there are hundreds of other countries which won't care same as it happens with piracy