Say you're producing an independent film, or a game, or some other work that is multimedia, working on a shoestring budget, and with a limited set of skills.

I'm not a fan of copyright in general, but I'm not sold on there being any ethical issue with scraping images to produce training data. People can cry "Copyright infringement!" if someone is using a machine learning model to produce something that's recognizably derivative of specific work present in the training data. However, I don't think it's appropriate in most cases, as the output is often transformative. Also, if you want to go down the intellectual property rabbit hole, a lot of art websites put in the ToS that works could be sold as training data by the controlling entity of the website (at least until people got up in arms about it in late 2022/early 2023).

TL;DR: In my opinion, the output is too far removed from the input to warrant people from getting a slice of the pie, and most people didn't have any basis for a legal argument until about two years ago.

I'm reminded of a passage from a book I read as a teenager:

Almost all of Earth had grown unbearably hot, from climate changes, and chemicals, and power plants, and fallout. Cool areas had become hot and dry, and hot areas like India had become furnaces, all but unlivable except for special "ice box" cold shelters. There were no trees and no birds, only insects that crawled the baking streets. Death shadowed the Earth, through every turn, through every orbit, all under an impassive sun.

—Michael Ely, Centauri Dawn

especially if you’re neurodivergent or disabled or trapped in an abusive relationship and couldn’t hold a normal job

I was all three and AI would have let me get the capital to escape one of those things. Too bad people were too busy frothing at the mouth over it when it would have helped me the most.

You would die (or be out on the street and wish you were dead) if your primary source of income relied on having access to filler art for some purpose and you didn't have thousands of dollars to hire an artist.

The amount of people that have drunk the Anti-AI Kool-Aid is staggering, honestly. I don't know about you, but I couldn't pay thousands of dollars to an artist, or multiple artists, to say, illustrate a tabletop game while I do all the systems design and playtesting myself. AI can make weird stuff too. it can make artifacts that would be really difficult to make with conventional tools. AI isn't autonomous; it's a tool. People should be empowered to use tools to make things to express themselves and provoke the hearts and minds of others.

Now we have people arguing that making a drawing in someone else's "style" is copyright infringement. You all complain about artists losing their jobs while getting your clothes and chocolate made by slaves in exploited third-world countries because you can't afford to live ethically under capitalism. It's absolute lunacy. You're either privileged enough to be part of the problem or you're shooting yourself in the foot by protesting something that might actually benefit creative people at or below your economic class.

Game engines were a mistake because they allow people to make content faster. Back in the 90s people would have had to learn assembly to make a game. Think of all the programmers that lost their jobs.

Big, fat /s

Organize and make a social media disaster for Valve. That usually gets companies like this off their asses.

This is US politics we're talking about. No one cares how smooth you are on the inside. Being smooth on the outside is what counts to voters.

There was a post about it a week ago in this community.

True. The issue is that you don't want to be the lone idiot at a protest with a gun because you'll just get singled out and absolutely fucked. The biggest hurdle is that the majority of the country has been brainwashed into thinking peaceful protest will solve all your problems if you just hope, dream, and yell hard enough.