Nothing was stolen from the artists but instead used without their permission. The thing being used is an idea, not anything the artist loses access to when someone else has it. What is there to complain about? Why should others listen to the complaints (disregarding copyright law because that is circular reasoning)?

It's piracy, not theft. Those aren't the same thing but they are both against the law and the court will assess damages for both.

The person you replied to derailed the conversation by misconstruing an analogy.

> what's happening is objectively wrong.

Doesn't seem like a defensible claim to me. Clearly plenty of people don't feel that way, myself included.

Aside, you appear to be banned. Just in case you aren't aware.

> The person you replied to derailed the conversation by misconstruing an analogy.

Curious why you say this. They seem to have made the copyright infringement analogous to theft and I addressed that directly in the comment.

It was an analogy, ie a comparison of the differences between pairs. The relevant bit then is the damages suffered by the party stolen from. If you fail to pursue when the damages are small or nonexistent (image classifiers, employee stealing a single apple, individual reproduction for personal use) why should that undermine a case you bring when the damages become noticeable (generative models, employee stealing 500 lbs of apples, bulk reproduction for commercial sale)?

This is precisely where the analogy breaks down. The victim suffers damages in any theft, independent of any value the perpetrator gains. Damages due to copyright infringement don't work this way. Copyright exists to motivate the creation of valuable works; damages for copyright are an invented thing meant to support this.

That would only be a relevant distinction if the discussion were specifically about realized damages. It is not.

The discussion is about whether or not ignoring something that is of little consequence to you diminishes a later case you might bring when something substantially similar causes you noticeable problems. The question at hand had nothing to do with damages due to piracy (direct, perceived, hypothetical, legal fiction, or otherwise).

It's confusing because the basis for the legal claim is damages due to piracy and the size of that claim probably hasn't shifted all that much. But the motivating interest is not the damages. It is the impact of the thing on their employment. That impact was not present before so no one was inclined to pursue a protracted uphill battle.

Oh, I agree with all that, I had sort of ignored the middle post in this chain.

I dunno, man. Re-read your comment but change one assumption:

> They still won in court based on the profits they determined the "theft" cost them, and the settlements were absurdly high.

Such court determinations are wrong. At least hopefully you can see how perhaps there is not so much wrong with the reasoning, even if you ultimately disagree.

> They're training them on the actual images artists create with skills honed over decades of work.

This is very similar to a human studying different artists and practicing; it’s pretty inarguable that art generated by such humans is not the product of copyright infringement, unless the image copies an artist’s style. Studio Ghibli-style AI images come to mind, to be fair, which should be a liability to whoever is running the AI because they’re distributing the image after producing it.

If one doesn’t think that it’s wrong for, e.g., Meta to torrent everything they can, as I do not, then it is not inconsistent to think their ML training and LLM deployment is simply something that happened and changed market conditions.

> This is very similar to a human...

A machine, software, hardware, whatever, as much as a corporation, _is not a human person_.

> Nothing was stolen from the artists but instead used without their permission.

Which is equally illegal.

> disregarding copyright law because that is circular reasoning

This is not circular, copyright is non-negotiable.