The newness or novelty of thievery isn't relevant to whether it's thievery or not.
The difference is that, for better or worse, our society chose to follow the model that artists own the rights to their work. That work was used for commercial purposes without the consent of the artists. Therefore it's theft.
I actually do believe all industries should be worker owned because the capitalists have proven they can't be trusted as moral and ethical stewards, but I'm specifically talking about GenAI here.
I think it's disingenuous to say that people have a choice to publish data or not in an economic system that requires them to publish or produce in order to survive. If an artist doesn't produce goods, then they aren't getting paid.
Also this is kind of a pedantic rebuttal but the GenAI software technically does first have to copy the data to then train on it :) But seriously, it can be prompted to reproduce copyrighted works and I don't think the rights holders particularly care how that happens, rather that it can and does happen at all.
The difference is that, for better or worse, our society chose to follow the model that artists own the rights to their work. That work was used for commercial purposes without the consent of the artists. Therefore it's theft.
I actually do believe all industries should be worker owned because the capitalists have proven they can't be trusted as moral and ethical stewards, but I'm specifically talking about GenAI here.
I think it's disingenuous to say that people have a choice to publish data or not in an economic system that requires them to publish or produce in order to survive. If an artist doesn't produce goods, then they aren't getting paid.
Also this is kind of a pedantic rebuttal but the GenAI software technically does first have to copy the data to then train on it :) But seriously, it can be prompted to reproduce copyrighted works and I don't think the rights holders particularly care how that happens, rather that it can and does happen at all.