I tend to agree. People grandstanding about AI art “stealing” are either unable to appreciate how their use of artistic “influence” is fundamentally the same, or else they’re arguing disingenuously.

There is nothing new under the sun. What artist can point to any aspect of their work that cannot be broken down into a simple mishmash of things other people did before? The only thing “proprietary” about it is the set of weights: a pinch of Bosch’s religious macabre, a tbsp of Escherian perspectives, etc. Some of this is conscious; most is not. That doesn’t make it any less true.

At the risk of over-reduction, all creative endeavor can be viewed as the combination of pre-existing concepts or categories in a novel way. How well your art is received is a function of how cleverly you mix these ingredients and how well you disguise this “trick of the light” so that the whole is more apparent than its parts. If any sufficiently sized “chunk” of pure influence makes it through, you can be accused of plagiarism.

I’d argue the models we have are already playing the game better than a lot of human artists. Soon they’ll be irreproachable.