> Oh please. First of all, how do you steal an idea?

You toss this out as though "Intellectual Property" is this concept you don't understand as (probably) a software developer of some sort, and beyond that, an entire divison of law, to which most companies have entire floors if not entire buildings of lawyers to deal with.

> We’re talking about pictures.

I'm talking about all art in all media. There is generative music, you know. And yes the big ones for now are the text, which has been trained on millions of blog posts, reddit posts, written works creative and otherwise, all, and I will keep saying it, without the permission of the authors by and large and similarly things like MidJourney which in turn were trained on massive imagesets with different specializations, but whose sources included: photographers, illustrators, painters, furries, and likely millions of people drawing in the anime style, *also without their permission.*

> If you believe that training models on art is stealing, then I’m a master ninja, since I’m the creator of books3. And even Stephen King today came out and said that he’s fine with it

I mean, you tell me. You created a thing you stand to profit from (even if indirectly via name recognition) via the use of IP you didn't have the rights to and got permission from ONE affected individual, after the fact. If you want to be ethically in the clear, why not get permission from everyone else? Then you're done. I suspect because a) it will be a substantial amount of work and b) that you know very well most people are not going to be comfortable with their creative output being used to train a machine who aren't already rich, which means a much, much smaller dataset to use.

And if it makes you feel better you can frame as all as zealotous luddites who want to smash your machine, but again, for the record, I do find this interesting. The only part I take issue with is rent-seekers trying to monetize access to them to monied entities, and what said monied entities are going to do with them: which is largely generate spam to sell at whatever price they can manage.

> If he’s not worried, why are you?

I'm not a creative, I'm not worried for me. I just don't like what's about to happen to creatives. I don't like technology being wielded by people who don't have skin in the game, who don't respect the creative process. I frankly find it incredibly offputting how ready and frankly gleeful everyone in my field is to put millions of people to pasture with no plan for how they're to make a living, especially given how hard it is to do so as an artist already.

I just cannot conceive of someone who's like "we should automate creative processes so humans have more time for spreadsheets and time cards" and just... UGH. What in god's name sort of world are we even trying to build anymore!?

> I take a dim view of people trying to frame researchers as criminals. We’re not. We want to further science. That’s all.

I'm sure Oppenheimer did too.

> You call me a grifter,

To be clear, I called users of your model grifters, not you personally.

> but I’ve made roughly a hundred bucks from books3, and that’s because someone found my patron buried under a pile of links and subscribed to it many months ago. Most of my researcher colleagues seem to have similar distaste for wanting to make money. The work is the goal.

That doesn't change the fact that what you guys are building will be used to inflict catastrophic societal harm by people who are not looking to "do the work" as you'd put it. They're looking to maximize profits because it's their contractual obligation. If they can make one designer do the work of a hundred by feeding them a drip of AI generated garbage to tweak to something usable, they will in a heartbeat *AND YOU KNOW THAT.*