But these aren't the same, at all - these are orders of magnitude different.

You as an individual photographer training on tens of thousands of photos over decades is not at all the same as an AI program training on trillions of images in a matter of days.

All these images we the people created for other people to see are being taken by one of a tiny number large and rapacious companies and being sold back to us.

I'm a computer programmer, but all my life I've watched people, long-time professionals in creative fields like journalism, writing in general, music, or art, have their livings systematically devalued and finally destroyed by the machine, and nothing has sprung up for such people to do instead with their lives. "Learn to program" isn't going to hack it.

Now many of them have died young, and while the causes varied, overall they died of poverty. One who is still alive commented that in a ten year period, every single client she had, some of which she had had for twenty years like the Village Voice, went out of business or stopped paying for writing.

The idea that the artist of the future is going to be someone who experiments with prompts to the hottest and most expensive AI program fills me full of sadness.

It's a systematic heist yet again, from almost all of us, to the economic benefit of a tiny number of large companies primarily, and to a small number of their affluent customers secondarily.

It's morally and ethically wrong, it's economically devastating to creatives, and it's spiritually horrifying.