Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists’ permission. And that’s without getting into AI’s negative drag on the environment.
I say in every art form you’ll find more copies than originals. Literature, cinema, paintings, photography, music… Everybody who’s creative is copying and reusing and recombining and sampling and synthesizing ideas.
And that’s true also for computer generated art.
The difference is that it’s hardly possible to claim ownership for a picture or a video that was automatically generated by algorithms.