> Except, of course, no one has actually been robbed, the culture has not been stolen

I respectfully request that you get all the way outta here with this take.

Artists have caught AI generating literally their own work, for free, at scale. There have been tons of articles on this website about the AI hyperscalers slurping up books, copyrighted works, etc through legal and questionable ways. Even TFA says that the NYT suffered absolutely devastating CTR drops.

If you create a blog post about something super esoteric, it will guaranteed end up in the training sets for every big-lab frontier model within 24 hours (probably less) and probably show up in Google's AI Summaries at around the same time. It's also well-documented that their spiders don't honor robots.txt either and blocking them is basically impossible unless you give Cloudflare protection money (since spiders can super easily solve Anubis hashing challenges).

If that doesn't sound like theft-as-a-service to you, I don't know what to tell you. All I know is that hosting content ANYWHERE AI labs can get a hold of it is rapidly becoming a fool's errand, and we will all be at a loss for it.