> Pre-training is very much a matter of scale - and scraping is merely the easiest way to get data at scale. Therein lies the problem. AI firms just bulldozed

> Pre-training is very much a matter of scale - and scraping is merely the easiest way to get data at scale. Therein lies the problem. AI firms just bulldozed ahead and "just did it" with no consideration for the ethics or legality. (Nor for that matter, how they're going to get this data in the future now that they're pushing artists into unemployment and filling the internet with slop.) There is no "imagined counterfactual", people just want AI firms to follow basic ethics and apply consent. Something tech in general is woefully inadequate at. The counterfactual isn't offered by artists, but AI companies. "If we had to ask consent then we couldn't have made this". Okay, so? The world isn't worse off without OpenAI's image generator. Who cares, there's no economic value to these slop images, they're merely replacing stock assets & quickly thrown together MS paint placeholders. Given how much of a shitshow this technology has always been (I refuse to mince words: This tech had it's "big break" as "deepfakes", and Elon Musk has escalated that even further. It's always been sexual harassment.) The actual net value to society is almost certainly negative.