Humans and machines are just different.

As someone who does creative work (writing and animation mostly), posts it publicly for free on the Internet, and tries to actively help people learn (by, e.g, answering questions when somebody asked how I did something or what my thought process was), I'm very much in favor of humans learning from something I made, and I'm also very much against a model like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion learning from something I made. Let me explain my stance:

There's a lot of reasons to help humans that don't exist for machines. The biggest one (and I suspect this to be the case for a lot of artists) is that anybody that's trying to learn an artistic endeavor is automatically somebody that I relate to. Learning to do art well is hard. I think any good artist is in a constant state of struggling to improve, so they're very going to be very much cognizant of how it feels to struggle to improve, and it's highly likely (or at least my perception is that it's highly likely) that anybody seriously studying somebody else's art and trying to learn from it is experiencing something similar, and has similar goals and motivations. In that situation, it's only human to want to help the other person out.

That doesn't apply to a machine. Stable Diffusion is not living with three roommates with no health insurance and only one pair of pants with no holes in them, earning rent and food off spotty freelance work for random people on Twitter. ChatGPT isn't burning the candle at both ends working a day job and spending long nights trying to piece together a short story good enough to get published in an open call fiction magazine with a 1.1% acceptance rate that pays ten cents a word. There is no toiling human making sacrifices because they were born with an irrepressible urge to create; instead, it's arguable that the primary reason these things exist is to provide some return on investment for the huge companies that own them. Microsoft's dumped billions of dollars into OpenAI. It must be expecting to make that money back somehow, so helping ChatGPT out feels like I'm just making some faceless suit even richer than they already are, which is sort of the exact opposite of helping out a fellow creator.

(There's an argument to be made that things like ChatGPT are providing a net positive to society, so I should feel happy to help train them on that count, but in their current state I don't think they are. That's a separate ramble though, and a tangent I don't really feel like getting into while I'm explaining my stance here).

The outcome I expect from helping a human is also different from the outcome I expect from helping a machine. Humans are different from machines. For a human to copy somebody's style, I think they have to fully understand the process that the other human took to arrive at that result. To do that takes solid fundamentals, and to develop those fundamentals you have to spend a lot of time practicing, which means exposing yourself to new influences. I really do think it's pretty much impossible for somebody to completely copy somebody else's style. When you create something, it's a deeply personal experience. What resonates with you? What image, or theme, or emotion, or experience, spoke to you on such a deep level that it drove you to spend forty minutes trying to animate a foot so it slaps against the ground in just the right way? Is it really likely that any other individual is going to see what you made, and get out exactly what you put into it, without putting any of their own spin on it? In my experience, it doesn't happen at all. So when somebody copies you (as long as the copy was effortful), it's a joyous experience to see what they made. It's interesting and illuminating and fun to see an earnest expression of how somebody else sees your art, to the point where people do stuff like this: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/85799efa-2901-4cf7-a05d-a5... (I don't have any special connection to WoF, it just happened to pop up when I googled 'draw other artist style meme')

OK, but somebody with solid enough fundamentals could get /close enough/ that it doesn't matter, and then sell to less discerning members of your audience, right?

Well, I guess in-principle that's possible, but it just really doesn't happen. Anybody that had the drive to get to the point where they could copy somebody else and have it look good probably already has their own style they're proud of. I don't know a single artist that would be happy with a client coming to them and saying "hey can you draw me something and make it look exactly like <other artist> drew it?". In the worst case they'd tell you to fuck off, in the best case they'd begrudgingly accept your money but probably be insulted and not put as much effort as they would be working on something personal and exciting for them. So another person learning from you isn't infringing on your audience and livelihood. Or if it does, the impact is so small that the positive feeling of helping someone similar to you out outweighs that by quite a bit.

Machines aren't like that. Machines will gladly slurp up your entire body of work, churn through it in training, and then shamelessly crap out a limitless supply of stuff that's rehashes of things you made for somebody that wrote 'by <your name>' in the prompt. You don't even get the warm fuzzies of knowing you helped somebody out, or the cool experience of seeing somebody else's interpretation of your art. It's just an uncanny Frankenstein of your work that's a sordid reminder that a good portion of people out there don't see artists as people, don't engage with art the way you do, and don't want to respect your wishes that the stuff you make not contribute to a cash-and-power shift that's decidedly not in your favor.