Some software licences can be very, very expensive.
When I was in art school in the early 2000’s, I worked with computer controlled weaving looms. The program for drafting patterns and running the AVL Compu Dobby on the loom was free to download. In order to use it, though, you had to have a $3000 usb key.
There is the issue of copyright though, since original works are used to train AI. That whole debacle is a can of worms that I will not open.
You had some great points, but then glossed over the biggest issue we have, as artists, with AI. People’s entire portfolios were scraped to train these things without their permission.
First thing I learned in art school is that theft and forgery are the most lucrative careers in the arts. (In hindsight, maybe a red flag there.) If an AI developer came into an artist’s studio, grabbed all their paintings and ran out, you can clearly see that’s theft. Just because the art theft is automated and largely unseen, doesn’t mean it isn’t still theft. People don’t like having their life’s work stolen from them.
Generative AI could have been a great artistic tool, but it’s been tainted for a lot of artists by the blatant, egregious theft at its very core.
The part that hurt was the ancient Mac II that ran the loom. When I encountered the Y2K bug on it, some upperclassmen said, “Oh we’ve just been turning the clock back a year.” Turned it back as far as it would go…1969
“The Dems MUST have cheated. We cheated so much, there’s no way they could have won 😡“
I always suspected this is why they couldn’t accept that they lost.