Whether an artist pays for a subscription to openAI or buys paint pots on Amazon.com money is going to a billionaire, it is not a difference between ai and other art.
You are also ignoring the existence of non-commercial open source AI, they exist.
Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.
(spoiler: bootstrapping yourself up the tech tree gets progressively harder)
An LLM takes a prompt and produces a painting. No sane person would say that I 'drew' the painting in question, even if I provided the prompt.
> Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.
We copyright things that require creative input. A list of facts or definitions did not require creative input, and is therefore not copyrightable.
Using an LLM does not meet the bar for creative input.
That sounds like a kinder restatement of the opinion at the top of the thread: "Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too."
Artists might not like the phrasing, but scratch the surface and there's a degree of truth there. It's an argument from self-interest, at core.
Your brain is a neural network, just FYI.
A major difference between a human training himself by looking at art, and a computer doing it, is that the human ends up working for himself, the computer is owned by some billionaire.
One enhances the creative potential of humanity as a whole, the other consolidates it in the hands of the already-powerful.
Another major difference is that a human can't use that knowledge to mass-produce that art at a scale that will put other artists in the poorhouse. The computer can.
Copyright exists to benefit humanity as a whole... And frankly, I see no reason for why a neural network's output should be protected by copyright. Only humans can produce copyrightable works, and a prompt is not a sufficient creative input.