If you want to make a pie from scratch…
I’m sure there’s plenty of people that make their living (or maybe barely scrape by) off digital art that are affected by this so I can understand some touchiness. I mean why pay $100 for an account avatar or other small commissions when you can generate it yourself in one second. But also, why pay a scribe to copy an entire book by hand when a printing press does it faster? The only difference in these statements is that hand scribe wasn’t a widespread profession 5 years ago.
To me an artist is someone who uses tools to realize their vision. As technology progresses so do the tools. ComfyUI is leagues better of a tool than something like DallE will ever be, but no the entirety of “AI Generated Art” is a sin and must be attacked. Oh, not the corporate zeitgeist heisters, but instead the users of the community driven software.
Looting API keys makes way more sense. They must have been stuck using GPT2 to write that incoherent statement.