I very much agree with what you’re saying here and I appreciate you saying it, I especially agree that the technology is fundamentally inseparable from the capitalists that created it, and it would not be able to exist in its current form (or any form that’s even remotely as “useful”) without the levels of theft that were involved in its creation

And it’s not just problematic in the concepts of ethics or “intellectual property” either, but in how the process of scraping the web for content to train their models with is effectively a huge botnet DDoSing the internet, I have friends who have had to spend rather large amounts of time and effort to prevent these scrapers from inadvertently bringing down their websites entirely, and have heard of plenty of other people and organizations with the same problem

I have to assume that at least some of the people here defending its development and usage just plain aren’t aware of the externalities that are inherent to the technology, because I don’t understand how one can be so positive about it otherwise, because again, the tech largely can’t exist without these externalities unless you’re either making a fundamentally different technology or working under an economic system that currently doesn’t exist

To be honest, a lot of the arguments in general in this thread strike me as being out of touch with the people facing the negative consequences of this technology’s adoption, with some people being downright hostile towards anyone with even the slightest criticism of the tech, even if they have a point, I think a lot of this is driven by how there doesn’t seem to be very many artists on this site, and how insular this community tends to be (not inherently a bad thing, but means we’re not always going to have the full perspective on every topic)

There’s other criticisms I can make of the genAI boom (such as how, despite the “gatekeeping” accusations over “tools to make things easier”, artists generally approve of helpful tools, but genAI creators are largely working against such tools because they want to make everything generalized enough to replace the humans themselves), but I only have so much energy to spend on detailed comments