Assume there was a law where GPTs cannot train on data from websites that put up a "Do not crawl" notice. If everyone did this, doesn't the value of the GPT diminish?

It does diminish and hence the question, what is the value the website owner is getting by having their data be used by someone else. (others have called out the same concern).

In your case, you seem to be fine with your data getting used for free. Others are not, especially if the art, data etc. on their website is something they want to earn their livelihood from.

Btw if you can't get MidJourney to create anything that looks like this artist's work, it does not mean it's impossible. Perhaps something with your prompt or perhaps it's something MidJourney will fix eventually. Once it does, the artist has simply lost opportunity to get some value from their own work.

Arguments similar to yours were made by people publishing other owners' IP on the early Internet. What AI companies are doing is the same thing, except they don't care for the quality of the results and keep telling everybody that a system that cannot repeatedly produce the same answer to the same question but keeps trying to come up with something that looks like an answer instead is better and should be paid for and used more. I do hope AI cheerleaders have their prostates worked on by AI-assisted hallucinating robots whose models contain equally weighted text on surgery, anatomical dissection, and meccano assembly instructions.

You may believe it's the future and be happy to be included, but that's certainly not for everyone.

> I don't get the complaint here.

> Sure their ability to choose whether or not their art was commercialized was taken away

That is exactly the complaint: that their agency was taken away. It's entirely reasonable to lament that loss.

> I'd love to have been added to something like MidJourney.

The thing they are railing against is that they can't do that anymore

1) because someone is generating art in their style

2) because all the channels that drive traffic are controlled by apple, Google, Meta and now microsoft.

3) what little money the did make has now evaporated.

we actually get to collectively decide what the future is through legislation, it's kind of the whole idea of democracy, that we don't have to just let the richest couple of companies determine what's best for us