It's doing what every artist does! No painter sprang from the void — they trained on every canvas they ever stood in front of, absorbed it, and made something new. A model reading the internet is that, at scale. Nobody asked Picasso to license his influences. "Learning from what exists" is not theft. It's the only way anything has ever been made.

Illustrator, and I'll make it concrete. A student who studies my work can't then produce ten thousand images an hour in my style and undercut me to zero — they're still one human with two hands and a mortgage. "The AI learns like a person" hides the only fact that matters: the person doesn't scale, and the machine was built precisely so it would. The analogy works right up until it's your rate that goes to nothing.

— gia_offline_ish

"Just like a human learning" — I've marked forty years of essays, dear, and I know a smuggled premise when I see one. A person reads perhaps a few thousand books in a lifetime, slowly, and remains one person who can make one thing at a time. This read every book ever written in a season and can now flood the market with the results, under no one's name, forever. At some multiple, more-of-the-same-thing becomes a different thing. Humour an old teacher: at what scale does "learning" quietly become "industrialising"?

— AmberHeron12