The innovation of AI Art is that it has invented a novel method to take the existing users of your product, and treat them as capital instead of as human beings.
Of course we have realized and internalized the adage in the title of this post, it has been true for a long time. But most people (myself included) thought it was just about advertising. If you're not paying, then your eyeballs are being harvested by the second for fractions of a penny. But that's not all! Everything about you can be monetized.
This has been true for a while now. Google infamously operated a 411-like phone service, purely for the purpose of harvesting voice data, and shut it down when they had enough data (and were blindly copied by Microsoft). Facebook asks you to tag your friends so that you can provide training labels for its person-detection algorithm. When you are logged in to Chrome, your browsing activity is used to build anti-click-fraud models so Google can pay less money to publishers.
And now Github uses your code for Copilot, and every image hosting service will lay dubious claim to artwork for purpose of building their own proprietary image-generation framework. It is being treated as a commodity, a material precursor for a manufacturing process. Ore for the refinery, yarn for the loom, grist for the mill. The economic value of a collection of artwork will be quantified in terabytes.
The moral outrage against AI Artwork stems from the perception that it is dehumanizing. This perception is rooted in fact.
