Quick thought experiment.

I’ve been a professional photographer and videographer for almost 30 years. My work has almost certainly been part of training generative AI datasets. I don’t feel robbed. I haven’t lost access, income, or authorship. One image out of millions helping a model understand light or composition doesn’t register as theft to me.

Learning patterns from finished works isn’t the same thing as copying finished works.

A very small but mighty loud group of creatives vehimately disagree with me. You can see them in my comments throwing every personal jab at me they can think up. They mock my engagement numbers and accuse me of crimes against humanity. I understand their fear and anxiety. It's a toubling time to be a luddite in the creative world.

Now let’s flip the argument for a second.

If we decide that learning from existing work (learning patterns to AI) is theft, not copying, not redistribution, not knockoffs, just learning, a lot more breaks than genAI.

Education breaks. Students learn by absorbing patterns. Writing. Math. Art. Science. If that’s theft, schools don’t work anymore.

Innovation breaks. Most business improves by observing what already exists and building something better. If pattern recognition is illegal, progress freezes.

Art breaks. Music uses shared notes. Photography uses shared physics. Writing uses shared language. Styles evolve because people study what came before. If influence becomes theft, creativity eats itself.

That’s the slippery slope no one wants to sit with.

To be clear, misuse should absolutely be regulated. Deepfakes. Non-consensual imagery. Commercial deception. Real copyright violations. NIL infringements. Those matter.

But outlawing learning isn’t regulation. It’s amnesia.

If we decide that recognizing patterns is theft, buckle up. What breaks won’t just be AI models. It’ll be the systems that made progress possible in the first place.

I don’t think that’s what most anti-AI folks mean to argue for. I’m just not convinced they’ve thought through where that line actually leads.