Transforming oil into petroleum also involves a lot of productive work and it doesn’t go unrewarded and in fact has to be taxed appropriately.
But generally in the case I described (topics in which just a few authors did most of the original work) I am not seeing any fundamental benefit if you compare this to a really good search engine—and such a search engine would benefit open information sharing, as it doesn’t do IP laundering.
I guess I don't agree with the assessment that it is a glorified search engine at all. It's a lot more novel than that.
I also agree that consent should be received before using an artists images in the training process.
That said, if one could compute a training data image's contribution to the end result of a particular query it is entirely possible we could see a portion profits flow back to these artists from the use of their IP in the training process.
But at the end of the day, when you train on billions of images, the end profit might be pretty minuscule. Any single artist's contributions might not actually matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. It's the combination of millions of artists that produce a result.
In my previous comment I was focusing on LLMs, per comment I was replying to originally. I gave a visual artwork only as an example, since it’s not quite possible with textual information. With text what we may observe is just less of it being published, and it’s difficult to use an absence of something as an illustration.
Though in recent years more people began catching on that leaving a good review might ruin a place for them, the evidence of that isn’t obvious (it’s just fewer reviews or less good-faith reviews). Similar results but on larger scale may be observed as people are catching on that writing they publish in the open is essentially feeding a magic answering box monetised by someone else.
But generally in the case I described (topics in which just a few authors did most of the original work) I am not seeing any fundamental benefit if you compare this to a really good search engine—and such a search engine would benefit open information sharing, as it doesn’t do IP laundering.