Targeting an open source project. So brave, what a statement. /s
This has 0 effect on all the big AI companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, etc. All this does is make it harder for FOSS projects and leaves the corporations to dominate.
They are wrong. Theft means depriving someone of having something, and that’s not the case here. It’s more a “they’re taking our jobs” kind of situation.
You forget all the images that "AI" models are trained on without consent or payment. Plus as you say, that training could result in the same artists losing work. Double theft, of IP and future income.
Important difference between you and an ML model: you can enjoy that art (YMMV), the ML never will.
There is a similar distinction between artists and galleries putting artwork to the public, and corporations auto-scraping billions of artwork for a statistical engine to mass produce qualitatively lesser versions.
