On the other hand this is what researchers do all day every day. PhDs and professors work for the common good and get barely any pay in return. Maybe the future model in art and music is more like the academic researcher.
Academia is a carefully constructed system whose incentive structure is based on highly visible explicitly measured citations and reputation.
People aren't generally just trying to maximize wealth. They're trying to maximize their sense of personal value, which tends to be a combination of wealth, autonomy, and social prestige. Academics (and some creative fields) tend to be biased towards those who prioritize prestige over wealth.
Artists don't see a single red cent from their work being sucked up into some AI content blender. Their work is being taken and used-- often in service of others making a profit-- and they receive nothing. Not even credit.
Edit: Well, they don't receive nothing-- they get a bunch of people telling them they're selfish jerks for wanting to support themselves with their work.
This is how it has always been, and fundamental to the economics of art. Things people are willing to do regardless of financial compensation rarely pay well.
Deviantart in the 00s was a huge repository of art people were mostly making for free. Some people got lucky and turned that into a full time occupation, but the vast majority didn't.
None of the people whose art was sucked up by these machines had any idea that this would be integrated into for-profit tools and used against them in the market place, and almost certainly would not have consented if they had known that. The ones with copyrighted images didn't even give legal consent. The fact that Getty's logo showed up in red carpet images is a symptom of a problem that obviously went well beyond Getty, but there's no way an independent artist could prove it.
Furthermore, if you think artists + luck = commercial art you're completely 100% wrong. Most art school graduates don't go into fine art for self-expression with some lucky individuals matriculating into careers-- they go for job training. Go look at the degree programs for any art school-- almost all of them translate into a full-time commercial career immediately out of school the same way a STEM degree does. Concept artists, illustrators, character artists, environmental artists, graphic desginers, VFX artists, animators, cinematographers, choreographers, commercial musicians and composers, photographers... these people don't just spring up out of the fine art world. That is their career. I know because I am one.
Your ethics-dodging free market tech libertarian garbage holds no sway with me, so you might as well just save yourself the keystrokes.
AI allows more people to be artists without the skill barrier, and that is a social good.
I'm sorry that the mechanistic portions of your art career are rapidly losing economic value, but I think free tools like StableDiffusion (and the better tools that are coming in the future) should be available to every child (and adult) in the world. And the world will be a better place as a result.
The utilitarian argument is only philosophically defensible in the street car scenario; when people are deliberately pulling the levers unprompted and it could have been done ethically but it wasn't because it was just to darned inconvenient and/or expensive, the greater good argument doesn't work. It's the same argument people used to defend the Tuskegee experiment and its ilk... And roman public slaves. If we're willingly throwing people into the spinning wheels of progress because it will be wonderfully convenient and neat for non-artists to use other people's skills instead, there is just no ethical defense. Knocking the stool of from under someone using a tool they built and you didn't even have permission to use is just not ethical. You and many others end up falling back on right-wing platitudes about the free market.
I'm actually a technical artist— my skills are now dramatically more valuable. That doesn't make it any more ethical even if it works on my favor.
I was a developer for 10 years, and have seen this unadulterated hubris in nearly every group of developers I've ever encountered— when you find yourself explaining someone's job and industry to them, you might want to stop and ask yourself... "Am I pulling a Dunning-Krueger right now?"
Here is where I think you're wrong: Everyone is a potential artist.
Many never have the opportunity because of economic reasons: some people don't have the time to cultivate the mechanical skills necessary to render their vision.
All artists pull from the work of others constantly. That is 'using other people's skills'. It is absolutely privileged to have the opportunity to devote time cultivating art production skills (which is usually done by studying and replicating the process of the artists that came before them).
If someone is born to a single mother, grows up having to raise their siblings, then has to immediately start working to help support their family, they don't have the privilege or time to explore art production skills. Technology has been making art production more accessible for hundreds of years, and that's a clear net good. I want everyone to be able to make art if they want to.
It up to the artist if they want to manifest their vision without creating the pigments and brushes themselves, or using a drawing tablet, or using generative AI tools - it all can be art that is meaningful to the person who creates it and more art in the world is a good thing.
Commercial art isn't a very good representation of the artists soul: they are constrained by market forces or their patron rather than producing what their own heart desires. We should all be happy to sacrifice commercial art jobs if it means that every person in the world gains the ability to render the art that comes from their soul.
Being a professional artist isn't fucking magic. It's not winning the lottery or even getting drafted for a pro sports team. It's a large group of regular fucking careers just like any other but creativity makes up a larger percentage of their professional cognitive toolkit. I know a workaday oil painter who's neither well-known nor rich but went to college to learn how to be an oil painter and that's how he comfortably pays his bills. He paints seaside landscapes, wealthy people buy them to put in their vacation homes, and that's how he makes his money. He was in college right along side with graphic designers, animators, architects, product designers, user interface designers, and all manor of other professional artists. Just like any other non-licensed white collar profession, people who didn't go to school are in the business, but it's harder. I also know a professional comic book artist, many animators, sculptors that work in product development, and plenty of other professional artists that built normal careers like any other white collar professional. The fact that not everybody can go to art school to build an art career doesn't change the disposition of professional artists any more than not everybody being able to afford to go to medical school affects the disposition of doctors, and having "the soul of a healer" doesn't really enter the goddamned equation, does it?
Whether you're being deliberately obtuse or are painfully ignorant about something you've got a lot of strong, baseless opinions about, you're obviously not going to cut the bullshit and be honest with yourself. The reason you have to delve into all of these pseudo-philosophical mental gymnastics is because you're wrong, but you really don't want to be, so you're trying to construct a reality in which you're right. That's not how reality works. Using people's work without their permission to make a for-profit system to compete with them in their professional marketplace is not moral no matter how big of a castle of bullshit logic you build around it.
Bye bye. I'm going to let you hang out in your little land of make-believe by yourself.
That's a false dichotomy. Just because the economic issue and cultural impact are separate doesn't mean they're mutually exclusive. If a mugger stopped taking people's money and instead just walked around making people afraid for their lives by intimidating them or beating them up, that would still be immoral.
Whether people consider it immoral has no bearing on whether or not the cultural and economic issues are mutually exclusive-- they're not. You can't say that the argument is only about the economic issue simply because there is an important economic argument. It just doesn't make sense.