I'd argue that there was no consent here in the first place. I want to remind everyone, there are plenty of times and reasons a contract can be invalidated.

Consent requires the person knowing what they are consenting to. How many people do you think know that posting your face on Facebook consents to using your face to generate photos? Your voice to create voice generators?

What about when someone posts a group photo or video and despite you not having an account that the same rules apply? What about all the photos created by others and uploaded by those with no ownership or rights to the photos in the first place? They can't legally give away the rights.

Then we also have to consider that the environment has changed and the terms changed under people. You may have signed up for Facebook and knew they were going to use your data to sell ads and do some analysis. But you didn't know AI was coming (let's be real, no one knew even at the time of AlexNet. It didn't become clear in tech groups until maybe 2016/2017). Sure, the agreements might "be the same" but people always contextualize things. In 2012 you might not care that Facebook "owns" your voice because you know they have to host the file, and contextually it is "just over legalize". But in 2024, now the context is that this trains a model that can replicate your voice and this means something VERY different.

I think there's this common attitude of "Oh, well you agreed to the terms" as if this makes the terms fair, reasonable, or okay in the first place. It doesn't account for the reality of the situation. It just further legitimizes this world where a person is legally culpable for not having domain expertise. News flash, we live in a specialized world and you can't be a domain expert in everything. It doesn't account for the fact that there is often no alternative and there is serious cohesion at this point. Unfortunately, not all the choices in your life are up to you and many are social (and many of those are idiotic and can force you into decisions nearly no one in the group wants[0]) and not all the choices you make ultimately come down to you. If it was up to me everyone would be using Signal to communicate with me and no one would have bought Apple products when they made their devices unupgradable and charged more for _increasing_ your disk space than it would cost to buy 1.5 drives in the first place. But also, thank god that everything isn't up to me because I'm also a fucking idiot.

No, I don't think there was consent this whole time and as time progressed we amount and capacity you have had to consent to has decreased. And dismissing it (the fact that consent is not binary) just makes the problem exponentially worse. Not to mention all the dark patterns which I can do a whole other rant about.

[0] Prime example: the American presidential race. The vast majority of people would rather have neither Trump nor Biden running. The vast majority of people do not want a gerontocracy but will vote for one of the two candidates because what other choice do they have? People __could__ agree to to vote for a third party, but doing so gives such a strategic disadvantage that people are rational in attempting to choose from the options provided to them (see primaries).