I dunno if it is acceptable or not but I ended up dressing up part of a blog from a few months ago and submitting that:
We as a species will put googly eyes on our roombas and give it pet names and take care of it like it is part of the family. We will see personality in places where there is just cold, unfeeling pattern recognition. Nothing can be random, everything is being controlled by the forces of the universe, and this must be some manifestation and exhibition of “the soul.” Right?
That’s hubris. These machines are not capable of making human decisions. They are something you insert numbers into, it calculates those numbers, and tells you the result. It’s easy to be metaphorical about a description like that, but there is nothing creationary happening here.
When a person creates a piece of artwork, it is because they have the overwhelming desire to express an emotion. That art (whether it’s a painting, a novel, a song, or whatever) is a lightning rod to channel their feelings. That is why particularly powerful art makes us feel things when we experience it, because it is human emotion in its rawest form.
When a robot creates a piece of artwork, it is because it has been asked to. Because it has been fed a “prompt.” The robot has no overwhelming desires. It only exists because a human asked it to exist.
And what the robot generates isn’t a collection of influences from things it picked out for itself because it formed an emotional connection with the source material. It’s generated from information it was spoon-fed by someone else. The only reason it is able to generate beauty is because somebody else made an emotional connection and told the robot to copy its homework. Any sense of feeling or expression present in what the robot has generated is tantamount to an accident.
It isn’t arrested by anxiety it cannot control, or understands what lovesickness is. It does not feel fear or curiosity. It only thinks when it is told to think, and it can only tell you things that other people have already thought.
This is why AI generator software needs so many thousands (or even millions) of data samples to draw from – because that allows it to more easily hide just how much of it is simply recycled from existing content, and that obfuscation theft sells the lie of creativity where there is none. It is stagnation at best.
One could then attribute the copyright to the person writing the prompt: that the generator software is merely a tool for creating new art. But even that is not true, as you can give the software the same identical prompt and get a different result each time. The person writing the prompt simply waits until the right Frankenstein of existing assets shows them what they want to see and then they cash out. Even AI generator advocates will say they're "rolling" their prompts, in the sense that they're rolling the dice in the hopes of getting what they want.
These machines are not intelligent, and they are not creating anything that falls under legal ownership.
Even if it's not the kind of material they're looking for (I don't honestly know), at least saying something is better than saying nothing.