I think it's pretty easy to argue that generative ai has no value whatsoever without a large set of training data, which happens to include the works of creator

I think it's pretty easy to argue that generative ai has no value whatsoever without a large set of training data, which happens to include the works of creators without permission. You could even go further and say most of the value involved with these models is in the training set, and not any of the engineering or models themselves. GPT-4 would suck a lot of they hadn't hoovered up a significant chunk of the internet. One could view these models as massive alienation machines, designed to separate data from the people who created it. I think that's really bad for the arts and for the economy, and eventually for the AI companies themselves. It's going to be really hard to keep getting training data when nobody is posting anything for you to steal anymore because of the egregious thing you already pulled off. It may not be strictly illegal, but in the view of many, including the author of this tweet and myself, it's incredibly unethical to cut artists away from the value they were responsible for, and even more perverse to then use that work to put them out of a job while claiming it's for the good of humanity.