I don't even think it's that deep. Most of what I've seen has been no deeper than 'it steals from artist and make slop', they cannot articulate what slop is or explain how it steals. Their opinions are just r/all post titles they memorized and that's the end of it.
They don't understand how it works and midwits always hivemind against what they don't understand. Outside of ripping their content from Patreon (which would be stealing because of piracy, not because of training), there is no stealing involved. If you donate to a patreon to train from them you are paying for it, and if it's available for free it's fair use. So the only legitimate argument is against people scraping from paywalls.
As for making slop, all indie markets are 99% slop. Back in the days of Steam Greenlight slop was rare, as soon as Indie on Steam became a flat fee with very minimal curation you immediately got Fidget Spinner Haven and a trillion footporn puzzle games. That doesn't mean it was a mistake either, I'm happy to have the absolute gems that are Gunfire Reborn and Schedule 1, Mio, etc coming out despite the sea of slop that they drift in. But the second something gets easier, slop becomes more common. Hell, look at AAA. Back in the days when AAA was actually good we had you having to have a Maya or Max license, a license to Scaleform, A license to Photoshop because back then you needed a license to Quixel DDO and NDO to texture anything competently, a license to Visual Studio, a license to this a license to that, all to make a AAA game, almost all engines were proprietary and different. Now any dweeb with blender and some money can put together something vaguely AAA in UE5. And where is most of the AAA slop made in?
All AI does is lower the barrier to entry to certain levels of creation. It doesn't inherently make things sloppy. A smart enough developer can and will create genuinely great things with it. Hell, when Youtube began slop was 99% of the sites content. Even early goats like Smosh, Rhett&Link or NicePeter didn't actually begin to create sketch comedy worthy of watching until around 2008-2009.
Their environment argument is technically valid for Chatgpt, but not because of AI, everything cloud servers the size of Oracle farms do consumes far too much energy. Those machines legit are bad, but it's pretty obvious it's the hardware being used, not the software it's running. Get enough Tesla h200s together and it doesn't matter if it's rendering frames for Disney or DC or doing AI for Sam Altman or what have you. Anything using that many GPU resources is going to be an environmental disaster. But Chatgpt itself is not really what's using most of that power. And this is despite it being one of the least optimized AIs going purely for parameter count over any form of proper optimization. No, what really is using most of their power is the cloud features they all use. As let's not forget, ChatGPT and Gemini are far from the only things people use those servers for each day.
Economically it's a similar story. Cloud computing takes up a shitload of ram and storage and processing power the more it scales up, the more you want those machines to do, the more cores, memory and storage you need. So they pay top dollar to get first dibs. And again, cloud computing includes cloud storage, which all these artists complaining definitely use in very large quantities.
Granted the environment and economic issues are only for AI working via cloud computing, because those issues are all inherent to cloud computing. So it really just comes down to morons sticking their fingers in their ears saying "Nanana I can't hear you" and then claiming to win the argument because they botted their likes on Twitter.
The one thing that low key pisses me off about AI is no one has thought to use it to make a video of an enraged blood covered Alex Jones fist fighting a bunch of gay anthropomorphic frogs. That kind of content would net you SO much god damn money on tiktok.
Welp, It's not exactly what you asked. But I kinda got it for ya.
