To make a more substantial argument, I think these AI art devs are really shooting themselves in the foot by continuing to develop a lot of this stuff. Art being exposed to the public does not mean that there isn't a copyright associated with that art, and frankly the developers of the base model, Stability, really ought to have at least talked to some of the artists whose art they used to train this thing. If this continues, it's going to have a horrifically cooling effect on artists being able to make a living on their own work or being willing to share that work with the public, in the apparent absence of protections for that work, legal or otherwise. Eventually, this is really going to limit the amount of training data available to those AI companies, which will end up hurting them and their ability to train new models. And that's without talking about whether this stuff will actually be found to be fair use. Many people here seem to be focused on the idea that all transformative work is fair use by default, but that's not really the case, especially if the transformative work threatens the market for the original, which this clearly does.
I think it's important to bring these points up ad nauseum on any discussions involving this technology rather than blithely accept this as the new status quo, or just some harmless technical innovation.
I wonder how long society will tolerate the nonsensical idea of copyright before it's had enough.
Intellectual property is nonsense and I'm glad it keeps getting exposed.
And yeah, wild to think people feel entitled to own their own work thanks to silly things like the entire body of copyright law.
Yeah, hijacking and derailing every distantly-related discussion to your pet political issue has been recognized as bad netiquette since, at least, the early Usenet days, and its definitely not appropriate here. There is definitely an interesting and important discussion to be had about the practical, ethical, and legal issues around AI training and use, intellectual property, and the market for works of the types that models are trained on, but your overtly stated crusade to hijack all AI image generation conversations onto that topic is wildly inappropriate for this forum.
Several styles in animation already converged to the same playbook to cut the production costs. They can massively benefit from this, as it enables things that were not possible before due to the high manual labor requirements. This is a major limiting factor.
Maybe, just maybe, the point about replacing the skilled artists with prompt-writing monkeys is moot, because this is an emerging highly technical creative field akin to 3D CGI and nobody is actually doing it like the panicking crowd with zero understanding likes to imagine? If anything, the industry is perfectly capable of exploiting underpaid labor and drowning itself in shit without using any AI.
Might it also be that the entire moral panic and the ethics angle was just a viral fluke of a twitter horde amplifying the info noise without giving it any thought or having a look into it?