Raw LLM Responses

Keshuel First of all, I must address your question of ‘what is there to steal when it hasn’t even existed yet’. The numerous works of the artists exist. The hundreds and thousands of hours they put into refining and mastering their crafts exists. And no, we will not stop calling it stealing, not until the glaring problem of unethical monetization and the disrespectful approach towards intellectual property owners is solved. Regarding your comparison, creative jobs and blue collar jobs are two completely different fields of work that require their own dedicated set of skills and are of equal importance. But the one thing about blue collar jobs that made it fell victim to replacement is also the thing that creative works will never be, and that is repetitive. 

Moreover, I think you are picking the wrong fight here, as artists are doing this neither as a mean of defending our ego nor to prove our situation more worthy of awareness and consideration than other cases of the same nature. The core of this battle is not against the AI itself as a promising, powerful tool and its relevancy, but the companies and individuals who are utilizing it with minimum ethical and legal concerns. We are speaking up to protect our rights and identity as creatives and ask for the rightful credit given to our craftsmanship, which is already an arduous battle long before the emergence of AI-generated media. Although I do see where you are coming from as the process of an artist finding inspiration and an AI learning from existing data is marginally similar and can both be generalized as ‘referencing’, but they are still fundamentally and indefinitely different. Throughout our life we can only study a certain number of photos, artworks and other materials, whereas an AI would be looking at millions, if not billions of them, and churns out an excessive number of artworks that are devoid of any stylistic originality through statistical calculations and weighing probability. Artists on the other hand curate and gather their reference responsibly as well as making various conscious choices to best convey their message, personality and artistic directions. And the most significant of all is the broad variety of unique inputs exclusive to the artists' personal experiences and the colorful culture that they come from. And last but not least, I would like to emphasize that the AI art generator basically owes its existence to the artists and their works, and would not have gain the level of traction it have today without the works it ingests non-consensually from great artists as the developers refused to choose the path of only using non-copyrighted images from the beginning.