Comment by chefandy

Avoiding legal and ethical issues. This stuff was made by a bunch of real people, and people still get their name in movie and game credits even if they got a paycheck from it. Microsoft shamelessly vacuuming up proprietary content didn't change the norms of the way people get credited in these mediums. It's sad to see how thoughtlessly so many people using generative AI disregard the models' source material as "data" while the models (and therefore their creators) almost always get prominently credited for putting in a tiny fraction of the effort. The dubious ethical defense against crediting source works— that models learn about media the same way humans do and adapt it to suit their purposes— is obliterated when it is trained on one work to reproduce that work. That this is equated to generating an image on Midjourney it's a blatant example of a common practice— people want to get credit for other people's work, but when it's time to take responsibility the way a human artist would have to, "The machine did it! It's not my responsibility!"