> It ain't shit without all the human effort that went into creating the training data. To my displeasure, I think the law will see it your way, but I don't think people should be so flippant about marginalizing over so much human creative effort. I have no problem with acquiring the rights to photos to train image generators, because that's the true cost of these products. It has nothing to do with final file size.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'marginalizing'. The contribution of the artists is valid and necessary. I know a lot the "common folk" in the SD community enjoy that some artists are upset by this whole thing, but like, I think on the whole the community is supportive of artists.

Though, I do have another angle here: Copyright is absolutely out of control and the vast majority of it at this point is accruing for the benefit of Disney as a result of lobbying on behalf of Disney and others. I think it is fundamentally absurd that children can grow up with beloved characters and die of old age before the copyright on those characters expires. And that's kind of the whole issue here right? Like, if artists wanted a 20 year copyright term on something, I think that is good and reasonable. They should be able to exclude their images from training data. I'd even be in favor of going as far as to say that there should be some associated metadata to facilitate that and that the government should enforce compliance, artists should be able to sue, etc the whole 9 yards.

But lets even say we keep copyright as it is: death of the author + whatever number of decades. Even if you could enforce the law (I can't even imagine how you would, especially in the coming years), all this does is push the problem for artists out until either models get better at learning from less data (so that you can make do with the far more limited amount of training data you buy the rights for) or enough data enters the public domain.

The Luddites weren't wrong. They really did suffer as a result of technological disruption. As with all things, the solution is a basic income funded by a land-value-tax.