The "stolen" stuff is a murky one and enormously charged with emotion. If you go to a bunch of museums to observe a heap of paintings, then read a stack of books, then create your own work inspired by these learnings is this stealing? You wouldn't really call it this. With AI, it's similar in the sense that the technology has trained on material. It hasn't stolen it from anyone. Arguably.
This is a bad argument. If I create art inspired by other works of art, it's a new thing. It's filtered through my human experience. I create things that are the sum of my experience and skills.
Generative AI has no experience. It doesn't have skills in the same way that people do. It has no point of view. It can't pick things that are important to it to be inspired by because it doesn't value aesthetics or prose or get inspired. It doesn't know or think, despite the anthropomorphism practiced by its proponents. It can only regurgitate based on probabilities. Maybe it's remixed based on the prompt, but the machine that's generating images isn't creating. It steals because it doesn't bring anything new to what it generates.
Likewise, the prompter is not creating art. They may be using a tool to ask, "What would it look like if I combined these two things?" While they may be bringing their own values to the process, they are not creating. They're equivalent to the ideas guy who's constantly trying to get people to work for them for free. That's why GenAI has such appeal to the executive class. They don't have the skills to actually do anything, only ideas.
