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By that rationalization, OpenAI is paying their Internet bill, and for a copy of Dune, so they’re free to use any content they acquired to make their product better. Your original argument wasn’t akin to, “Shouldn’t someone using an iPhone pay for one?” It was “Shouldn’t Apple get a cut of everything made with the iPhone?”
You could make the argument that people use ChatGPT to churn out garbage content, sure, but a lot of cinephiles would accuse your proverbial indie movie of being the same and blame Apple for creating the iPhone and enabling it. If you want to make that argument, go ahead. But don’t pretend it has anything to do with people getting paid fairly for what they made.
ChatGPT is enabling people to make more things, easier, to get paid. And people, as always, are relying on everything that was created before them as a basis for their work. Same as when I go to school and the professor shows me lots of different works to learn from. The thousands of students in that class didn’t pay for any of that stuff. The professor distilled it and presented it and I paid him to do it.
If Apple (or any metaphorical creator you want to insert in here) doesn’t want you using their product to make your movie, too bad. You bought their product. Even if millions of people end up watching your movie, they can’t turn around and ask for any more. You acquired their product fairly like anybody else. Your transaction is done. If they don’t like it, they should ask every person who’s ever made or contributed to any version of the components in their device and see how they feel about it.
Now people using ChatGPT to impersonate artists shouldn’t do that. But those individual people should be prosecuted. Nobody’s confused that Andy Warhol might be quickly painting the pictures and sending them over in the DALL-E chat and you can’t honestly make the argument that people aren’t buying Stephen King books because they can type “Write me a Stephen King novel” into the prompt generator.