I heard a bunch of explanations but most of them seem emotional and aggressive, and while I respect that this is an emotional subject, I can’t really understand opinions that boil down to “theft” and are aggressive about it.
while there are plenty of models that were trained on copyrighted material without consent (which is piracy, not theft but close enough when talking about small businesses or individuals) is there an argument against models that were legally trained? And if so, is it something past the saying that AI art is lifeless?
No, the thing that the author was trying to express has far greater validity than whatever the reader makes up. If that wasn’t the case, AI art, where the author lacks any intent, wouldn’t seem so lifeless.
That presumes you can read the author’s mind. It’s impossible to tell with 100% certainty what an author meant to say. You can make assumptions and some can be more plausible than others and people can agree that one interpretation seems more valid than another but that’s it. When a work of art is released into the world, the author has no authority over its meaning.
A good artist of course can make certain intentions very obvious and control, to a certain degree, what the recipient feels. That’s what you’re perceiving as missing in AI generated pictures.