Thank you for articulating the split between the users of AI models and the owners of the models. I like using the models in the manner of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and from that perspective, all the arguments about artists’ moral rights are nothing more than regulatory mumbo-jumbo and sour grapes. However, I do strongly agree that there is something morally icky about companies such as “Open”AI and HuggingFace making bank off the training data they’ve scraped. That’s why I prefer Stable Diffusion and its clones, as it lets us run it locally without someone making money in a pay-per-prompt (or, worse, monthly subscription) model. Democratize AI to anyone with a strong enough computer or don’t do it at all.
I should mention that Stability.AI, Hugging Face and Stable Diffusion are tightly connected. It's all a bit muddy, and I didn't help by mixing them up. However, what I think is that Stability.AI is the company, "Hugging Face" is the community based website for sharing models and the likes, and "Stable Diffusion" is the implementation of the diffusion model developed in a university in Munich.
It's not really fair to take it all out on Stability.AI, as at the very least, they are sharing the technology and models with everyone (for the time being). And that open up some incredible possibilities.
It's much worse what DALL-E, Midjourney and others do, which is much the same, while they let people play with it, but it's all theirs, and they can take it away at any moment.
