To me the AI thing is about big vs small.

Steal from a big company, that's the cost of doing business baby!

Steal from a small business and.... WTF do you think you're doing?

The AI thing is largely large companies stealing from everyone. Large and small alike.

Real-world example: I'm not alone in this, as has been made clear from my time on the internet, but if I saw someone shoplifting groceries from Walmart or something, then, I didn't see anyone stealing from Walmart. I didn't see shit. Turn that around and say someone stole some handmade trinket from a booth at a convention, I'm going to go find the nearest security guard.

AI steals from small artists and authors, commentators and you and I, as much as it steals from big businesses. We, the people, don't have the same capability to fight against someone like openAI taking our shit, compared to a multinational media conglomerate. The AI folks seem to believe that it's fine as long as nobody complains, then enter agreements with meta and Reddit to buy up all of our written, photographed, and otherwise self-published information to buy everything we've ever submitted to their platform.

The big companies are raping us of our intellectual property, claiming it as their own, and selling it to other businesses for fun and profit. We generated all of that content that they sold and they gave us nothing for it. They got it for free, all the while, selling us ads and confusing "algorithm based" feeds of bullshit to try to enhance their bottom line.

We've been lied to, stolen from, intellectually and financially raped, and we've gotten nothing in return. They took our inherent need to connect with one another, and turned it into dollars in their bank accounts. They're not providing a service, certainly not providing one worth using.... What they are doing is farming us to line their own pockets. Our ideas, thoughts, comments, videos and pictures are their crops that they repackage and sell to whomever will pay for it. This is just the latest in "people are the product" things that gets repackaged and resold back to the people it came from, and we get the privilege to pay to use the AI they develop off the backs of our labor.

If AI wants to steal from big businesses like news media outlets, or companies like Disney, nobody would give any shits about it. Go the fuck ahead. You want to wholesale steal the thoughts and ideas of every person who has ever submitted anything to the internet? Fuck you.

AI is borderline useless anyways, just the hallucinations of a machine that's doing it's best to regurgitate the most likely combination of symbols that will make the "success" metric go up. The order of those symbols is entirely based on a long history of what symbols, in what order, followed a real interaction between two flesh creatures. Emulate the response of the flesh creatures, win the favor of the flesh creatures.

It doesn't think, it doesn't care, it gives canned responses from a mind bogglingly large dataset of possibilities. The ones that are given the blessing of the fleshy creators are ranked higher than those that don't. It's a tape recorder with more steps. A lot more.