I consider copyright immoral, but I still struggle with the idea that most of us have to honor copyright but the big companies scraping for image models don't h

I consider copyright immoral, but I still struggle with the idea that most of us have to honor copyright but the big companies scraping for image models don't have to. Maybe we could view that as a positive erosion of copyright, but we could also see it as unfair exploitation of artists. Google can scrape from artists but what would happen if one of us tried to take Google's code? I have been playing with Stable Diffusion for a week. I think it is going to have a significant impact. The so-called disposable art probably gives lots of artists their first paid gigs that gives them paid time to practice and build a portfolio, while learning to work with customers. I think a lot of that work will shift to prolific prompt-engineers who know their way around the software. I'm very pro-automaton (I'm a robotics engineer) but I don't like the idea of taking work from a bunch of artists without their consent to build a model that depresses their wages. I would rather these companies worked on sample-efficiency (an important area of research) and stuck to the millions of openly licensed images available on the web, then worked with twitter and instagram to add image license options to the photo widgets so that we can all build up a consent-based model. And artists that want to keep their work for themselves have that choice. I don't think it will happen, but I do wish we actually honored the consent of the artists. I think it's a shame we're not.