Artists learn through blood, sweat, and tears. No artist achieves excellence without significant effort, and won't arrive until they've attempted original works

Artists learn through blood, sweat, and tears. No artist achieves excellence without significant effort, and won't arrive until they've attempted original works many times. And they can spend their entire lives without ever finding any success or actually being particularly good. Are their outputs colored by the culture and prior art they've experienced? Absolutely. That's how learning works. Compare that to AI. It doesn't do any actual "art" work to become an artist, nor do the people who train it, it just sucks up what's fed into it, without the consent of the creators. Then, it can create much, much faster than an artist without breaks and without pay, and it is owned and directed by a huge faceless company as, effectively, a fleet of mindless slaves, diminishing the livelihoods of the very people absolutely essential in training the model. From a moral perspective, all you really need to ask is, would these artists have consented to this training if they knew mindless AI slaves would replace them?