It's the same bad faith argument as:
"It's perfectly OK for a police officer to observe a street corner, see crime happening, and go take action, therefore, building a complete, panopticon surveillance system that watches all street corners simultaneously and deploys police to take action, is perfectly OK, too, since that is exactly the same thing."
I haven't seen this articulation before, and I'm going to remember this one!
In return, I'll share my own reasoning:
Human Life is finite, and there is a real opportunity cost to learning (say) to copy Picasso's style -- you could've been doing something else in that same Time.
However, if you're training a model on the entire career output of dozens of artists, it only needs more electricity + GPUs to do this.
And, transposing this back to the Human realm, there's no way one person can put in that kind of wide effort to learn how to copy dozens of artists' styles in one lifetime.
I really like the way you put it too -- it's a bit more succinct.
The quantity of an action can have a qualitative difference. I wish I didn’t haven’t to explain that to so many people everytime a new technology is created.
Quantity has a quality all its own
I don't know if it's even OK for a cop to just randomly watch a random street corner without a specific reason to do so. If a cop was following a given person around all day every day without probable cause would this not be considered harassment? If we view the Flock Camera network as a single system is this not harassment?
Just to add context and not to comment on rightness, that was one of the early core purposes of policing--to ensure that a people in a particular public space (where either the people or the space are particularly vulnerable) are free from unwanted disturbance. Here is that exact concept shown in a painting from 172 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners_(Jules_Breton).