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Notes -
I wouldn’t want to accuse everyone who is down on AI art as being insincere or a dirty rotten motivated-reasoner -many people freely admit their concern is mainly for the livelihood of artists-, but I have seen these discussions play out many times on many different forums. I have rarely seen the ‘AI-art is stealing’ argument withstand even the barest scrutiny. It is often pushed by people who clearly do not understand how these models work, while aggressively accusing their opponents of not understanding how they work. As @Amadan pointed out in his far-better-than-mine post, when faced with the hypothetical of an ethically trained AI, people do not declare their issues are resolved, which indicates that the core of the disagreement is elsewhere. It smacks of post-hoc reasoning.
I think the actual root of the objections are sympathetic. Artists are high status in online communities. People see a threat to them, empathise, and develop the core feeling of ‘AI-art bad’. From there we are into arguments-as-soldiers territory. Everyone knows that stealing is bad, so if you can associate AI art with stealing, even if the association makes little sense, then that’s a win.
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