not only would that cause way less antipathy and backlash, i also tend to believe it would end up producing a tool that is far more useful for commercial purpos

not only would that cause way less antipathy and backlash, i also tend to believe it would end up producing a tool that is far more useful for commercial purposes and actual working artists in the short/midterm. ethics and morality aside, one of the biggest problems with just scraping the whole of the internet for your training data is that there is a lot of artwork out that is simply not good. this is actually an existing problem for learning artists as well. if a student is looking to do master studies of a particular piece, any search for that painting tends to return a high volume of studies by other students and various other reproductions alongside scans of the original work, the difference often not obvious to untrained eyes. what you end up with are an endless series of faulty reproductions being trained on prior faulty reproductions. i tend to suspect that this kind of quality degeneration is fairly widespread within the current datasets which is why so many seo hacks are necessary to get them to produce consistent results.