Nobody is getting "ripped off" by ML models any more than by other humans. When a human wants to launch a high-quality podcast, they survey the market, listen to a lot of other high quality podcasts, and then set to creating their own derivative work.
What ML models are doing is really no different. It's just much, much faster.
Everything humans create is derivative of other works. Speed is the only difference.
Or is it that, at some nebulous point, a difference in speed between two things impacts the way humans choose to direct their efforts to such a great extent that, for all intents and purposes, the two things are qualitatively different?
That's like sayin "The only difference between drinking 1 gallon of water and 100 gallons of water is death." Yes, the quantity of something for a given use-case is bound to give different results.
What the parent comment was commenting is that the actions being taken by these models should not be morally classified as wrong in abundance just as humans following the same process would never be regardless of the output they produced.
>What ML models are doing is really no different. It's just much, much faster.
I take this argument to be that (a) what the ML models are doing is fundamentally the same as what humans already do (I agree with this part), (b) that we have no moral problem with humans doing this already (I agree again), and that (c) the fact that AI does it much faster is not sufficient to cause any moral difference (I disagree with this part, and gave a counterexample to show how, in general, a difference in speed can make a moral difference, because that speed difference can have a large impact on how other people decide to behave).