Let me change the argument around: Why is it assumed that because an artwork is freely available on the internet, you are allowed to train a machine to reproduce it, being in its totality or just details that are used in the creation of new works?
IE why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions.
So actually building a machine there, under the cover of darkness, that learns from your work so you can produce new work, why is that allowed in the first place? Certainly wouldn't be at a museum.
The key thing here is - if you want artists' data, you should ask for it. They didn't. This would be equivalent of training a Github CoPilot on every available piece of code in existence, ever, instead of what they had available. Why should that be allowed? So if I built some toy code in 1996, and happened to post it on usenet, and it's a great implementation of X, why the heck is CoPilot allowed to read it? It's my property.
IE why isn't it that an artist could say, hey I'm letting you see this painting, but you are not allowed to sit down with a canvas and learn how to reproduce it? Because you can do that in galleries - no photos, no reproductions.
So actually building a machine there, under the cover of darkness, that learns from your work so you can produce new work, why is that allowed in the first place? Certainly wouldn't be at a museum.
The key thing here is - if you want artists' data, you should ask for it. They didn't. This would be equivalent of training a Github CoPilot on every available piece of code in existence, ever, instead of what they had available. Why should that be allowed? So if I built some toy code in 1996, and happened to post it on usenet, and it's a great implementation of X, why the heck is CoPilot allowed to read it? It's my property.