> Just as chess players today enjoy the game even though computers have surpassed our chess abilities.
The "product" that chess players produce is not replaceable by ML systems. The game itself, the "fight" of two minds (or one mind against the machine, in the past) is the "product". Watching two chess AIs play against each other can't replace that.
For artists, the product is their output, the art itself. An approximation of that art can also be produced by a ML system now, making artists an unnecessary cost factor[1] for e.g. simple illustrations.
They are not comparable, IMO. Chess players are not replaced by ML systems, artists will be.
> it's unavoidable.
It really isn't. Of course it would be possible to just outlaw the use of things like "the pile", which includes gigabytes of random texts with unknown copyright status. The same goes for any training set that uses images scraped of the web, ignoring any copyright.
Yes, people would still do it, but it would have the same status that piracy has. You can't build a US multi-billion dollar company on piracy (for long), and you wouldn't be able to do so with ML systems that were trained on random stuff from the internet.
I don't think this, in such broad strokes, would be a good thing, to be clear. Such datasets are great for research! But I have a really hard time understanding this defeatism that there is "nothing we can do".
[1] from the perspective of some customers e.g. magazines or ad companies - I don't agree with this