I mean, Stable Diffusion is open weight, the code is there too, so is the paper, and it is free as in free beer and incredibly easy to use thanks to the open source community. In the same vein, Mistral is a good fairly libre LLM.

I think the problem is that when people hear AI they think DALL-E and ChatGPT whereas to me that's just weird corporate alternatives.

The way people interact with technology has been so commercialised and basically repackaged into less tech and more something akin to products for the average person and it's a damn shame. Crypto to them means something something NFT hot potato, to me it has always been about buying drugs and circumventing laws. To them - internet is ads, to me the internet is how I avoid ads that I see way more of IRL. Algorithmic content in my internet browsing experience is basically non-existent.

As a result there's a cultural divide there where us slightly more tech-savvy folks live in a completely different world where for us it quite literally really isn't the case. I'm happy to reach across that divide and educate so we can actually modernize the left because no matter what - this isn't going away.

But I think a lot of artbros don't really want to learn or discuss this, and when you have irrational, baseless reasons for hating AI art like blatant falsehoods i.e. "it's all just theft look at this totally not img2img example of my art!!!" or cultish nonsense about "souls" or "culture" or "spirit" or "human spark" or whatever other spook du jour, it's impossible to argue.

This is made even worse by the fact that at least from what I've seen, currently proposed regulations will only lock in corporate control on the models by ensuring that only those with the capital can meet those regulations or pay fines for not meeting them, and the artbros pushing for them without understanding anything about tech play right into the corpos hands.

It's ironic, the same types in my xp will often will joke about some unhinged code monkey on the orange website thinking he knows everything about politics just because he is the smarterest programmer in all of JS bootcamp, yet they fail to see that by repeating the silly theft and appeals to nature etc. arguments they are playing into the same trap of ignorance in that they don't fully understand the tech they're drawing conclusions about.