This argument rests on your views of labor theory of property, which suggests that you "own something" by "putting labor into" that thing. We loosely apply thi

This argument rests on your views of labor theory of property, which suggests that you "own something" by "putting labor into" that thing. We loosely apply this as a premise for intellectual property rights, but it's contingent on the state being the referee - and many cases have ended in rights being taken away from inventors because someone else worked the legal system to take it away. In the case of generative training data, it's largely being used as a commons resource. The more you are inclined towards labor theory of property, the more it "feels like" theft, because the original laborer would be credited as owner - the labor of the machine is derivative of that labor, and largely non-transformative since it results in imagery resembling the original, versus metadata, statistics, etc. Labor theory of property has many philosophical issues, as outlined with the "monkey selfie" case: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...