> pay a subscription to OpenAI in perpetuity in order to remain competitive with their peers

This is how technology works in general and should not be vilified. Someone comes up with a better way to do things (in this case bringing creative ideas to life) and charges a premium on top of that for their efforts. If the current wave of creators doesn't like it, then they should instead make something people want more than what their competition has to offer.

Either way, this is why local open source models are critical, so that everyone can benefit without needing to pay any single party.

If a company were founded tomorrow which allowed you to stream unlicensed TV shows and movies for a monthly subscription, undercutting Netflix and Amazons licensed streams, that wouldn't be described as "a better way to do things" just because their customers prefer it for being cheaper and easier because all the content is in one place. The difference between that and what OpenAI is doing is just degrees of abstraction, either way they're deriving value from others work without compensating them, and actively undermining the ongoing creation of the work they're appropriating, while simultaneously relying on the ongoing creation of that work to keep feeding their machine. It's a completely parasitic relationship where all value flows in one direction.

IP law has yet to decide whether my interpretation of the situation is correct in the legal sense, but I find it impossible to see "ChatGPT absorbs the work of writers/journalists and sells a superficially reworded version without attribution or compensation" as anything but theft obfuscated behind lots of fancy math. It's only going to get worse if LLMs end up displacing traditional search engines, so one day you'll publish an article and get exactly one impression from GPTBot which then turns around and figuratively copies your homework.

Forgive me for thinking that it may be difficult for independent artists to compete against the trillion-dollar groundbreaking plagiarism machine that is actively plagiarizing their work faster than they can produce original work, without consequence, and suffocating them under a deluge of generated works.

This is an extremely different difference of scale, which does constitute a meaningful difference from prior technologies.

It’s difficult for independent artists to live as independent artists today, even without the specter of a “trillion-dollar groundbreaking plagiarism machine”[0]. So far, we’ve still been producing original work, primarily because it’s what we do even when we’re not making money from it. It’s a blessing and a curse.

This is not to dismiss the concern. I simply wanted to state that artists will find ways to keep moving the creative bar forward.

[0] I really like this turn of phrase, thank you for sharing it.

> extorting

That's not what extortion is. Stop abusing language.