It sure did have a big impact, comparable to what some people expect to happen soon with AI.

However, I think your framing misses the main point of why many artists today are wary about AI: They are not just being replaced, their own work is used as a building block for the tools that will replace them; and they were not asked for permission and don’t even get any compensation for that.

If you have a basic understanding how AI works then this argument doesn’t hold much water.

Let’s take the human approach: I’m going to look at all the works of popular painters to learn their styles. Then I grab my painting tools and create similar works.

No credit there, I still used all those other works as input and created by own based on them.

With AI it’s the same, just in a much bigger capacity. If you ask AI to redraw the Mona Lisa you won’t get a 1:1 copy out, because the original doesn’t exist in the trained model, it’s just statistics.

Same as if you tell a human to recreate the painting, no matter how good they are, they’ll never be able to perfectly reproduce the original work.

But it does hold water. The original image might not be contained within the model, but the fact that it was trained on stolen data makes it problematic. Even if humans do the same, an AI model is not a human, and therefore needs to adhere to different rules.

AI pulling from a database to recreate artstyles is much more destructive than human inspiration.

Imagine you're a child book illustrator. Your work is out there and accessible. Now someone has the idea to get into it using AI. They really like your artstyle and tell the AI your name. Now the AI spits out illustrations in your artstyle, and many people might not even be able to tell the difference.

This random person uploads it or maybe even contacts your publisher. Worst case scenario they even buy his work and not care about the quality of the stories. Now you're actually replaced.

Now is this not copyright infringement?

Having the AI cite sources is not a solution to this as people will simply detach them. Having signatures on your works is not a solution and it actually makes it worse because then the AI copies it and now it looks like signed work from you.

When I first saw people using AI to make great images I thought the same. It's just a non human inspiration cycle. But human inspiration is so so different. You don't just look at existing images. EVERYTHING you've ever seen is an inspiration. Everything you've ever read heard or done too.

Human inspiration is one thing. Creation takes skill practice and time. AI creation doesn't. The program might have required skill to write, but that's not an excuse for it to threaten entire industries.