It's not theft, the artist still has their work. If anything, it's copyright infringement. When some 16-year-old aspiring artist uses another artists' work as a reference or traces something, what's that?
I guess you could call it practice, but then doesn't AI do the same thing by iterating based on its dataset? Some AI outputs look terrifying and janky - so did my art when I was younger.
I dunno, like this issue isn't as simple as I used to think it was. If we look outside of economics (because artists need money to survive, like all of us) is there actually a problem here?
I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about all of this, but it's pretty obvious AI isn't just gonna go away like NFTs did. I really am interested in discussion, I'm not trolling.
Yes, but how does that negate its usefulness as a tool or a foundation to start from? I never made any assertion that AI is able to make connections or possess any sort of creativity.
There's a common saying that there is no such thing as an original story, because all fiction builds on other fiction. Can you see how that would apply here? Just because thing A and thing B exist doesn't mean that thing C cannot possibly be interesting or substantially different. The brainstorming potential of an AI with a significant dataset seems functionally identical to an artist searching for references on Google (or Pixiv).
So is this your main issue? I'm just not sure that that is really a valid reason, since many people are very uncomfortable with like, organ donation, pig heart valves, animal agriculture, ghostwriters, real person fanfiction, or data collection by Google. I'm sure there is something in the world that most people see as either positive or neutral that makes you very uncomfortable. For me, it's policing.
On the economic front, I agree - these companies should have been licensing these images from the start and we should be striving to create some sort of open database for artists so that they are compensated. It's possible that awarding royalties, while flawed, may be a good framework since they could potentially be paid for all derivative works and not simply the image itself. But that may be prohibitively expensive due to the sheer number of iterations being performed, so it's hard to say.