The lack of empathy is incredibly depressing...
It would be very easy to make training ML models on publicly available data illegal. I think that would be a very bad thing because it would legally enshrine a difference between human learning and machine learning in a broader sense, and I think machine learning has huge potential to improve everyone's lives.
Artists are in a similar position to grooms and farriers demanding the combustion engine be banned from the roads for spooking horses. They have a good point, but could easily screw everyone else over and halt technological progress for decades. I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.
My empathy for artists is aligned with my concern for everyone else's future.
> I want to help them, but want to unblock ML progress more.
But progress towards what end? The ML future looks very bleak to me, the world of "The Machine Stops," with humans perhaps reduced to organic effectors for the few remaining tasks that the machine cannot perform economically on its own: carrying packages upstairs, fixing pipes, etc.
We used to imagine that machines would take up the burden our physical labor, freeing our minds for more creative and interesting pursuits: art, science, the study of history, the study of human society, etc. Now it seems the opposite will happen.
1) It'll no longer be possible to work as an artist without being incredibly productive. Output, output, output. The value of each individual thing will be so low that you have to be both excellent at what you do (which will largely be curating and tweaking AI-generated art) and extremely prolific. There will be a very few exceptions to this, but even fewer than today.
2) Art becomes another thing lots of people in the office are expected to do simply as a part of their non-artist job, like a whole bunch of other things that used to be specialized roles but become a little part of everyone's job thanks to computers. It'll be like being semi-OK at using Excel.
I expect a mix of both to happen. It's not gonna be a good thing for artists, in general.
It might in a few areas, though. I think film making is poised to get really weird, for instance, possibly in some interesting and not-terrible ways, compared with what we're used to. That's mostly because automation might replace entire teams that had to spend thousands of hours before anyone could see the finished work or pay for it, not just a few hours of one or two artists' time on a more-incremental basis. And even that's not quite a revolution—we used to have very-small-crew films, including tons that were big hits, and films with credits lists like the average Summer blockbuster these days were unheard of, so that's more a return to how things were before computer graphics entered the picture (even 70s and 80s films, after the advent of the spectacle- and FX-heavy Summer blockbuster, had crews so small that it's almost hard to believe, when you're used to seeing the list of hundreds of people who work on, say, a Marvel film)
Art is really not cheap. I think people think about how little artists generate in income and assume that means art is cheap, but non-mass-produced art is pretty much inaccessible for the vast majority of people.