My personal belief is AI should be limited to local and all sites should ban it, but it's too late for anything like that to happen. Artists should just draw and try to forget that their work will be scraped. The two worlds need to be separated, although obviously the AI group can't exist without artists. The AI people should be more humble about it since it's a parasitic relationship. Trolls will be trolls, though, and twitter and 4chan have really ramped it up into an internet war.

I think it's very noteworthy that the insult par excellence used by pro-AI people is "luddite," because the luddites were in a sense quite right: industrialization was a pretty bad deal for the working Englishman. After having the land they traditionally lived on privatized, getting kicked out, and then having to live in dirty ghettos in the city, the fact that now man, woman, and child were expected to work many hours in grueling repetitive tasks so much more mindnumbing than before yet equally dangerous very much was a good reason to be angry. The living conditions in England around the start of the 19th century were so abysmal, so full of pollution and cholera, that on the one hand slum tourism ("slum" was a newly-coined term) served to create the myth of the dirty medieval peasant with ragged clothes (because surely the march of progress would uplift the poors compared to how they were before, meaning they must've been really miserable back then!) AND the ideological reactions to these conditions served as the foundation of the same anti-modernity sentiment we see to this day when people quote someone like Ted, whether via communism or the romantic basis of fascism. Those were the times that inspired Malthus, for God's sake.

This is perhaps one of history's greatest ironies: even though the luddites were fighting back against a very obvious fall in living standards in an immediate and impactful way, one that absolutely everyone could see, their name now means "irrationally opposed to technology" in an inversion of what really took place, a denial of their reasons. Things were changing radically, and it took decades and decades of work for the situation to improve and reach the modern standards we are more familiar with. That we see today people devoted to art, in a world that was already accustomed to mechanized for-profit "content" and the constant lamentations from all sides that art is in some way dead, now ferociously reacting however they can against something that threatens to mechanize it even more, well, that should not be a surprise. It is indeed a war, one with extreme symbolic value. Sadly, public opposition has not taken any worthwhile actions comparable to real deeds of the luddites, and symbolic it mostly remains, unless someone decides to bomb OpenAI (paste). Just trying to learn about its methods may be considered legitimizing. But at least I can appreciate the rituals of disgust more than the dancing and flailing of technofuturists who, ironically enough, think themselves above history.