>>508624370Yep, exactly.
A funny instance of this came up recently in vtubing of all places.
There was some AI dress that was spread around on Twitter, unknown to people at the time.
A metric fuckload of fanart was made of various vtubers up until the news of that, OOH NOOO, the dress was AI this whole time!!!
This, naturally, peeved a few artists, but most never gave a fuck. It didn't make the work they put in to those dresses null and void, that was still effort.
I myself have used AI to make quick references of certain parts of dresses, like frilly skirts, or mesh clothing, etc.
I could have also went on to Google or Pinterest or some other shit to look for references.
Want to know something most artists don't do - pay for those references. They'll slap that shit in to a huge canvas in Photoshop and that's it.
I've seen artists STREAM themselves doing this live.
Yet nobody questions it. Why? It's just exactly the same shit that AI does. AI literally constructed the pages to allow them to find those images in the first place - the mass scraping of millions of websites is a thing some people consider immoral and unethical, some consider it illegal.
The likes of Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have and are still being sued / fined / investigated for scraping websites without permission, there's tools designed to fuck with web scrapers by dynamically constructing fake webpages.
tl;dr everything is fucked, people do the same shit AI does every day and don't question it because they have "agency" and are a "living being". lol