"Data Laundering": Commercial entities fund (either with money or compute tokens) academic entities which, in turn, create AI models which the commercial entities sell. https://waxy.org/2022/09/ai-data-laundering-how-academic-and...

Again, it's unclear how exactly that's against the law. Provided that the data was obtained legally, of course.

Most of the larger commercial entities seem to be doing the work themselves and being quite upfront about the entire thing.

Precisely. So when you say they used the images without permission, you are knowingly making a false implication - that it was known to them that they needed permission and that they intentionally disregarded that fact. In reality that has yet to be legally established.

Who said anything about sacrificing production? The entire point of the tooling is to reduce the production cost to as near zero as possible. If you didn't expect it to work then I doubt you would be so bent out of shape over it.

I find your stance quite perplexing. The tech can't be un-invented. It's very much Pandora's box. Whatever consequences that has for the market, all we can do is wait and see.

Worst case scenario (for the AI purveyors) is a clear legal determination that the current training data situation isn't legal. I seriously doubt that would set them back by more than a couple of years.

You might be surprised to learn that ethics and legality are not always the same and you can do something that's technically legal but also extremely shitty like training AI models on work you didn't create without permission.

I'm not surprised by that at all. It just seems that we disagree about the ethics of the matter at hand.

I'd like to suggest that you might be better received on HN if you were a bit more direct about making an argument of substance regarding the ethics.