Actual piracy doesn’t bother me, but I’m supposed to care that a robot learned English by reading library books? Learning is what libraries are for. Yeah, the draw-anything robot can only draw The Simpsons because it’s seen The Simpsons. How else was it supposed to happen?

Training is transformative use. You can’t spend a zillion compute-hours guessing the next word of a story, in such a way that it can fake Tolkien retelling Shrek as a rap battle, and claim that’s the same as LordOfTheRings.txt on an FTP server. What the network is and does will not substitute the original work. Not unless the Silmarillion had more swamp ogres than I’ve heard.

Image stuff will become a brush that does whatever you tell it. Type the word “inks” and drag it over your sketch, and it’ll smooth out your lines. Type the word “photorealistic” and it’ll turn your blocky shading into unreasonably good lighting. None of this prevents human art. The more you put in, the more you get out. Stable Diffusion is a denoiser, where the concept of noise can be defined as bad anatomy.

Video stuff might end Hollywood, as soon as editors figure out they’ve inherited the Earth. The loosest animatics can become finished shots without opening Blender or picking up a camera. A static image of what a character looks like should be enough to say, this stick figure is that guy. Or this actor is that cartoon character. Or this cardboard cutout is that approaching spaceship. The parts that don’t look like that are noise, and get removed. We’re rapidly going to learn how blobby and blurry an input can be, for the machine to export a shot from your head, just the way you imagine it. And where it’s not exactly what you intended - neither is any shot ever filmed. A film only exists in the edit. So anyone who can string together some already-spooky output, based on the stories they’d like to tell, is going to be a studio unto themselves.