>It's like saying you can use the internet for copyright infringement.
I think that a comparison that could help to elucidate the problem here is to a search engine. Like with imagegen, an image search is using infrastructure+algorithm to return the closest match(es) to a textual input over some particular space (whether the space of indexed images or the latent space of the model). Immediately, however, there are qualitative differences. A search company, as an entity, doesn’t in any way take credit for the work; it bills itself as, and operates as, a mechanism to connect the user to others’ work, and in the service of this goal it provides the most attribution it’s reasonably able to provide given technical limitations (a url).
For me this is the difference. Image gen companies, at least all that I’m aware of, position themselves more as a kind of pseudo-artist that you can commission. They provide no means of attribution, rather, they deliberately obfuscate the source material being searched over. Whether you are willing to equate the generation process to a kind of search for legal purposes is really the core disagreement here, and beyond an intuition for it not something I feel I can prove.
So what’s the solution, what’s a business model I’d find less contentious? If an AI company developed a means to, for example, associate activation patterns to an index of source material, (or hell, just provided an effective similarity search between output and training data) as a sort of good-faith attribution scheme, made visible the training set used, and was upfront in marketing about its dependence on the source material, I’d struggle to have the same issues with it. It would be leagues ahead of current companies in the ethical department. To be clear though, I’m not a lawyer. I can’t say how image gen fits into the current legal scheme, or whether it does or doesn’t. My argument is an ethical one; I think that the unethical behavior of the for-profit imagegen companies should be hampered by legality, through new laws if necessary. I feel like this should answer your other questions as well but let me know if I missed something.