Why do they do it now then? They do need this. They need absurd amounts of tagged images of varying quality and style. No, their own repositories are nowhere near enough for general models. They require the small artists. Many artists, small or large, will simply refuse to license to disney too.

Allowing them to take from the smaller artists does not help the situation either. They now simply have more data, which they can run through their better equiped systems, quicker than anyone else can do. This helps the big corps while doing little for us small devs.

On the matter of these being "otherwise public images" being what they are trained on, can you not see this destroying this large public repository of information? No new work made by people who have unique ideas will be made public. Why would they? if they do, disney and getty images can now out compete them. This will cause the currently massive resource of images, information, and general art to become hidden. To become no-longer public. This stagnates art where it is now. Only that which people are OK with AI taking will be shared, becouse it will be. We get the same outcome either way, save for that already shared, the only difference is that nobody is able to enjoy the art being made which the artists don't want training AI.