Ok, so you're all in on some weird ideology and give a fuck about the livelihood of your "artist friends". You had me. Great job. Good propaganda.

Corporate control is not the only thing you get (and actually not what I was leading to). You also get free money for the wealthy.

Getty claims to have the biggest private photo archive with 130 million images. How many does an artist own? The NYT owns all its archive a hundred years back; each daily newspaper having about as many words as a novel. How many novels does an author own? Of course, that's still small fry. Meta has trained its image generator on 1.1 billion images that were generously opted in by users of insta and facebook.

So that's how the licensing fees are going to be split. More money for the owning class, without any work required.

The money comes from subscriptions. Who pays subscriptions for image generators? The same people who pay Adobe for a subscription. People who have to make lots of high quality images. Professionals artists.

But you don't care cause you don't actually have artist friends. Fine. I have no idea what kind of crazy ideology you follow that you think a cyberpunk dystopia is the lesser evil.