There's people already, which smoke recreationally and/or advocate for legalization, that already don't see it in the same category as other 'harder' drugs. And, it hasn't always been illegal federally.
All this to say, it'll probably end up near alcohol on the spectrum you describe
If your argument is that "AI is just a tool and Capitalism is the real boogeyman, again" then I absolutely agree with you.
My gripe is that openAI and Meta are clearly scraping from copyrighted media but because of the scale of the scraping it's not 'stealing' in the traditional sense. While we're bickering about the semantics of legality, this tool is being weaponised to further wealth inequality.
And to be clear, I've been referencing the AI companies and movie studios, not the technology itself.
Only if its profitable, and given that Al output is inherently very limited, it won't be. Al can only produce lower quality
This is literally already happening. The SAGAFTRA screen actors guild had to negotiate new contracts against studios that were using AI as a bargaining chip to lower their wages
In your head is AI being used solely by common people for fun little prompts? If you build this machine that replaces the artist, corporations can and will use it that way.
Big movie studios will use it to generate parts (and eventually all) of a movie. They can use this as leverage to pay the artists less and hire fewer of them. Animators, actors, voice actors.
you want the rich and powerful to stop pirating and freebooting artist's work, maybe the first step is to ban that (or rather, enforce it) rather than a technology two steps removed?
If a movie studio pirated work and used it in a film, that's against copyright and we could sue them under current law.
But if they are paying openAI for a service, and it uses copyrighted material, since openAI did the stealing and not the studio then it's not clear if we can sue the studio.
Logically we would pursue openAI then, but you're arguing that we shouldn't because it's "two steps removed".
Seems like it's being argued that because of the layer of abstraction that is created when large quantities of media is used, rather than an individual's work, that it's suddenly a victimless crime. That because what's being done is not currently illegal it must not be immoral either.
What other secrets is Big Universe keeping from us