Well I disagree. You should have a fundamental right to opt out of these things. Even in a perfect world where everything is just and every artist can support themselves, I see no reason it shouldn't require the creator's consent. Surely, with no financial pressures to corrupt things, many creatives would willingly contribute to these models, and we wouldn't need to resort to this ugly, non-consensual scraping.

I think we're talking past each other. Your argument applies if we're talking about a liberal concept of ownership, or maybe judging the morality of ai, but that's unrelated to a material analysis of it. Generative technology requires massive datasets, which are the result of millions of hours of labor. This isn't a moral claim at all, it's simply trying to describe the mechanism at play.

Enclosure in the digital space isn't an exact parallel to enclosure acts in medieval England. I usually see it applied to the Open Source ecosystem: the products of volunteer labor are enclosed or harvested or adopted by private corporations. Google and Microsoft and Apple all built empires on this mechanism.

I mentioned a "mature" stage because I think the next step is more forceful enclosure and hoarding of datasets. The usability of the internet is quickly decreasing in lockstep with the development of AI, a dialectical evolution. It's eating away at the foundation upon which it builds itself.