I have tried to explain "you're not mad at generative AI, you're mad at late stage capitalism" before.

Most people aren't really willing to smash the state though (I understand, that's where all my stuff is) so look for less drastic ways to protect themselves.

Somewhat tangential, but the Krita community and core team have been pretty explicitly anti-AI. https://krita-artists.org/t/change-in-policy-for-topics-rela...

(I am part of a group that builds UI on top of open models, but we stopped working on our Krita version for that reason.)

Don't discount the value (or difficulty) of a great user interface

There are multiple servers that provide the backend "meat" already: gyre.ai (my personal project); Automatic1111 webui; InvokeAI; plus all the hosted APIs to name just a few.

There are no UI interfaces I'd consider great. I think Flying Dog aistudio[1] is the best (although I'm biased), but still early days. The UI part of WebUI is ... functional(ish).

DreamStudio / StableStudio is super basic in capability at the moment, but it's a space with tons of room for improvement.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcGlA38M52M

(Edit: markdown doesn't work here)

Yeah, neither view is a perfect fit. Another example is vision transformer backbones, where a common generic base weight is used to fine-tune all sorts of different processes (segmentation, image to text, etc). The terminology (and licenses) haven't really kept up.

A properly unencumbered model would be my preference too. The community generally seems a bit laissez-faire with license compliance though, so the restrictions currently don't generate much push back. (Plus it's not totally clear that you can copyright model weights at all, given they're the output of an automatic process).

Model weights can't really be described as source code though. The equivalence isn't exact, but I'd describe the weights more as the compiled binary, with the training data & schedule being the source (which is sort of under an open source license, with the complication of LAION's "it's just links"). The fact it costs $1 million to "compile" isn't relevant.

This isn't to defend Stability particularly though - they've been getting increasing slow and restrained in their model releases. Charitably because they're attracting a lot of heat from political and anti-AI aligned groups. Uncharitably because they've taken a lot of funding now.

(Edit: typo)