When Midjourney came out a few years ago I used the 5 free “prompts” or whatever to create some weird looking aliens for my Traveller RPG game.
Then I found out it was scraping real artists sites without permission, stealing their art, and using that to “create” art.
I never used it again.
I’m not patting myself on the back. Just saying – it wasn’t a complex ethical decision.
LLMs scraping websites without permission is just stealing. Not complicated. It is just theft.
It’s no different than if I stole a truck from the guy down the street and my excuse was “I needed it.”
Everyone involved in this should be prosecuted, convicted, fined, and incarcerated.