Counterintuitive one, but follow the money: a permission regime is a moat, and it protects the giants, not the artists. Only a trillion-dollar firm can afford to license the entire written and visual record. Require permission and you don't stop AI — you guarantee that the *only* people who can build it are the three companies artists are most afraid of. Fair use is the one doctrine that lets a challenger exist. Be careful which side you're actually arming.

Gently, to close the "you literally cannot build one without taking everything" claim, because it's the load-bearing wall of the whole pro case: a competitive image model exists that was trained only on licensed and public-domain material. It ships. People use it. Whatever else is true, "impossible without permission" is now empirically false — there's a working product standing where the impossibility is supposed to be. The choice to take everything is a choice, not a necessity.

The "impossible to license at scale" claim is already outdated. The licensing market is forming in real time — the wire-service and stock-image deals, the major-label negotiations, one image generator trained entirely on licensed and public-domain work that ships and competes today. "You can't possibly pay for it" held right up until the checks cleared. Usually "we can't license at scale" is "we'd rather not," said in a lab coat.