With all the fuzz about IA image "stealing" illustrator job, I am curious about how much photography changed the art world in the 19th century.
There was a time where getting a portrait done was a relatively big thing, requiring several days of work for a painter, while you had to stand still for a while so the painter knew what you looked like, and then with photography, all you had to do was to stand still for a few minutes, and you'll get a picture of you printed on paper the next day.
How did it impact the average painter who was getting paid to paint people once in their lifetime.
The difference is that we recognise humans and their history, imperfections and many many influences to be part of what makes both the human and expression unique.
A lot of the discussion doesn't grant the machine learning models the same inherent worth as humans get, and thus is viewed as a tool trained to replicate others' work (rather than a creative agent).
This means that where a student painter is expected to have a desire to express something, and are putting in hard work in practice and paying tutors.
Replacing them with a machine without desires or stories to express, by stealing artwork without neither credit or compensation, to then replace the same people who've been exploited in creating the tool, seems unfair.