Now riddle me this: Who pays subscriptions for Photoshop?

Ah, my favourite argument.

“Clothing brands are using slavery to produce clothes.”

- “They ought to be produced sustainably!”

“Who’s going to pay for that?”

Perhaps generative AI models, as they currently exist, are too good to be true.

If they can only afford to pay individual artists pennies, perhaps it is something that shouldn’t be taken. If those artists are happy for their work to contribute to someone else’s MRR scheme then they should be free to submit their work wherever, or tag it with something.

I don’t care what Getty Images gets paid. I don’t know how the licensing works for that platform, but Getty doesn’t make all of its own images and those photographers and artists who contribute ought to be compensated in turn.
If that makes the work infeasible, so be it.

But if that’s a system that gets implemented now then the existing companies would have an insurmountable headstart. Should they be forced to completely wipe their work?

And Getty shouldn’t be making money off pictures from the 1800s. I agree with that too.

And I understand no “value is generated” by paying property owners. I guess you should give your books away to people on the street since the value has already been created by writing them and there’s no more point in selling them.
Not literally, of course. But if individual artists don’t make any money and/or reputation off their already made work they won’t be able to continue “generating new value”, I guess they’ll have to find some office job, or head out to the not-yet-automated mines.

It’s a shit situation which is profiting off a free and open internet. An internet which is slowly closing itself off further and further.

And I think, with all due respect, you’re misguided for being happy to contribute to your own replacement. If you sell your books on Amazon; Amazon is getting flooded with AI generated books, making it even more difficult for yours to stand out in the sea of regurgitated garbage. Maybe you personally have a system for getting around that, not everybody does. Alternatively you don’t rely on the income of your books, but at that point why bother publishing at all? Might as well send them directly to OpenAI or whomever.

Edit: Oh, better yet, because I just ran into it: Getty/Adobe Stock licensing you generated images! I’d laugh if it didn’t make me want to cry.