In all those instances you paid for the physical resources.

not only the physical resources but also the licensing fees for the images and the labor required to research and assemble the books. none of that was free, either. some of those design texts were hundreds of dollars-- and, no, I’m not referring to your bullshit college textbooks that have meaningless markups.

while I agree with the philosophy that all human knowledge should be free and that we should all have free access to art and media and whatever, I’m simply explaining that I did, in fact, as an art/design student studying art/design pay for the material I learned from, including the art to which I was exposed (or there was some other form of compensation involved). i am not arguing whether or not that should or should not be the case.

i also made a clear distinction between what a human artist is capable of achieving and what an ai is capable of achieving. perhaps I should have continued to state that it for this season that I believe artists should be compensated when AIs train using their works/data due to the difference between how they use it and how a human artist uses it when creating original works vs ai-generated pieces.