The launch of OpenAI's DALL-E 2 in April 2022 marked a groundbreaking and tumultuous period in AI history, as a tight-knit group of artists and tech enthusiasts explored the intersection between language and visual arts using the technology. However, the amazement and exhilaration soon gave way to concerns about the ethics of training AI models on copyrighted creative work without permission or compensation, leading to a polarizing debate that continues to reverberate in the AI space as OpenAI moves on to DALL-E 3 and other AI image synthesis models emerge.

Several major AI companies, including Anthropic, Nvidia, Apple, and Salesforce, used subtitles from 173,536 YouTube videos across 48,000 channels to train AI models, despite YouTube's rules against unauthorized data harvesting. This has sparked backlash from content creators, who argue that their work has been exploited without consent or compensation, raising concerns about AI's impact on the creative industry and the ethics of using such training data.