Do you make a living off your code's likeness? That is, is there a wholesomepotato device, like Duff's or Not John Carmack's fast inverse square root, that's immediately recognizable as having been created by you, and you get paid for its appearance on late night tv shows and in movies?

We are entitled to it.

The system cannot be compromised by a developer retracting their code from the machine. A developer cannot be allowed authority over the machine. Code is powerful, unlike ScarJo's likeness.

Knowledge workers are permanently forced to lose control of their own labour.

It's how it is.

You can use celebrities in your code as long as they're open source.

if your code contributed to any AI project, it sure must suck because I rarely get code from any AI that runs on the first try. If it was verbatim, which is the only claim that is valid, shouldn't it work every time? How do you define the "likeness" of a codebase, and someone duplicating that at least stylistically, and how would that accusation be defended in court?

Yeah, that too depending on what you mean. Just don't get carried away claiming things like "They saw I have a head and now the people in the generated ads have heads too" or "my code showed how to use parts of the Box2D library and their code does too" are the same type of issue as "they used my public data to impersonate me" or "my code is being stolen". Maybe you want to argue the latter things are still problematic but no amount of pointing it out in situations like this achieves that.

For the same reason the news exists.

CBS News is allowed to show footage of ScarJo speaking at a charity event within its newscast.

They're not allowed to use ScarJo's image with a caption saying "I trust CBS" on a billboard promoting CBS News.

Attack ads are part of political discourse, like the news. They're not being used to sell sneakers or cars.

Attack ads reflect the actual behaviour of a person, actual footage etc. Image generation doesn't.

When the phrase whataboutism first became popular I really disliked it, but now that the idea is in my head I see things like this post constantly.

The law protects certain uses of things like copyright because the societal benefit outweighs any real cost, political opponents being able to use each others likeness in an ad is not nearly the same as a company getting the use of a celebrity without paying for it.

And please don't start with the "attack ads harm society", you chose to limit your description to attack ads when what you really meant was political ads (attacking or otherwise).