Response to AI art concerns

I am well aware some people have concern with AI art, but I also personally believe the concern is unfounded. I am a programmer first and foremost, and as such I am quite familiar with ethical debates surrounding tech - I had to take classes on it for my degree. And, after some thought, I have decided that AI is simply a tool, and ignoring that tool is akin to sitting and stubbornly letting the tides of change drown you.

To call it art theft is uninformed at best and willfully ignorant at worst. An AI is trained on models, but so are people; we have our own model of the world and are consciously and unconsciously influenced by things all the time. You are only seeing the final product, you're not seeing the literal hours that I spent refining the image, making sure there were no obvious deformities (there were a LOT), manipulating details, etc

Is AI stealing the work of historians because it collates knowledge in a form that can be easily accessed? You might answer no, it just uses what sites like Wikipedia have, but are those sites taking the work from libraries? Are libraries taking the work from people who you would otherwise have to purchase their books to get the information? Where's the end?

What we are in the middle of at this moment is a classic, classic fear that comes with EVERY new technology, it's just a fear that hasn't really impacted "creatives" before, due to the nature of their work. In the early 20th century, when cars were popularized, there was a lot of fear among the teamsters' union (a union composed of those in the transportation industry), doomsaying and the like as new tech was introduced that changed the landscape of the transportation industry. The teamsters' union is still going strong today, living proof that their concerns were overblown. There were changes, yes, but people changed with the times, as they always do.

For perhaps a more "immediately relevant" example, consider AI with chess - chess was long thought to be something uniquely human, something that indicated intelligence. In 1997, when the world champion was defeated by an AI in an actual match (not just one or two games), there was some panic, fear of jobs being lost, fear that the value of the game would be diminished, etc, but chess has survived that, and there is still robust human competition, and knowledge of the game has been enriched by the advent of AI.

There is, of course, fear in the programming world as well, accusations of stolen code (on arguably a much larger scale than whatever you're imagining, as models were trained using github and stackoverflow, basically the two places that the overwhelming majority of all public code, and even some private code, is located), fear of losing jobs, the works. These fears have been here long before AI was anywhere near as powerful as it is today, because we knew this was coming. And, despite all that, things have worked out fine. Even in my job, AI has been used and explored as an aid to programmers, and it hasn't made anyone obsolete, it's just another tool to help make things faster and better.

To me, the art concern with AI is the same. It's hard to get caught up in one of these scares when I know it's something that's occurred time and time again. I made the poll because, while I personally had no issue with it, I wanted to gauge the opinion of the public, and if public opinion disagreed with me, then I would accept it and not do something that would stir the pot too much. However, the poll showed that the majority of people were perfectly fine with it, and so I went ahead with it.