Artists are generally pretty encouraging to people entering the field and using their stuff as reference for new artists. That actually contributes to art. It's definitely not the same thing as a massive tech corporation trying to automate their livelihoods, but please keep making this flawed argument analogizing two completely different processes.

> It's definitely not the same thing as a massive tech corporation trying to automate their livelihoods, but please keep making this flawed argument analogizing two completely different processes.

Ah yes, the famous massive tech corporation behind stable diffusion.

> Now tell me how artists were not stealing from each other.

Key words being "from each other". AI only takes, it doesn't give anything back, it doesn't inspire. Their ultimate goal is to absorb the entire human history of art and then displace millions of people who received nothing from this transaction they were forced into, just so that some billionaire can afford another yacht.

I have no problems with AI models, but if you want to use art, writing, code, etc. for training, you should restrict your use to public domain works, ask for consent, or commission it. Obviously that would cost a lot of money so big tech companies are once again looking for a free ride.

> AI only takes, it doesn't give anything back, it doesn't inspire.

Totally wrong. There is even a well known counter example: dream-like videos generated by ai wasn't something we had before. This statement tells me you never used it.

> just so that some billionaire can afford another yacht

You are heavily mistaken, that the scenario where ai learning isn't considered as fair use of material. In this case, only megacorps will be able to trains their own AI by spending billions in content.

> Obviously that would cost a lot of money so big tech companies are once again looking for a free ride.

You are constructing your own story while ignoring what is happening.

Adobe and Dall-e models were trained with datasets they mostly had rights over. OpenAI partnered with Shutterstock, and Adobe have their own photo stock. Big tech companies didn't had problem looking for image content. Stable Diffusion on the other hand is open source & open research, but didn't had any rights on most of the image they trained.