Let’s take a look at how AI works. The language models and image generators need samples before they can generate anything – they can’t create text or images from nothing. The companies call this “training” – the AI is being provided huge datasets that are run through several algorithms. Where does that data come from? From us. Human creations. Books, media, the internet. In the case of image generators, the entire internet is scraped so that as many images as possible can be put into datasets for the AI to learn from. It’s very probable that what you can read here will soon be scraped for Chat GPT (a very refined chat bot) to integrate into its training dataset, and I’ve already found my art in the datasets of image generators like Stable Diffusion (more on that in a bit). Basically, if you can see it on the internet, it will be taken. Without our data (or “content”, as corporations like to call it), none of these tools would exist.