Whether an artist pays for a subscription to openAI or buys paint pots on Amazon.com money is going to a billionaire, it is not a difference between ai and other art.
You are also ignoring the existence of non-commercial open source AI, they exist.
Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.
An LLM takes a prompt and produces a painting. No sane person would say that I 'drew' the painting in question, even if I provided the prompt.
> Regarding copyright, we copyright output not input. Otherwise most photography would be uncopyrightable.
We copyright things that require creative input. A list of facts or definitions did not require creative input, and is therefore not copyrightable.
Using an LLM does not meet the bar for creative input.
That sounds like a kinder restatement of the opinion at the top of the thread: "Artists are mad because this tool empowers other people, who they view as less talented, to make art too."
Artists might not like the phrasing, but scratch the surface and there's a degree of truth there. It's an argument from self-interest, at core.
(spoiler: bootstrapping yourself up the tech tree gets progressively harder)