You really think it is morally ok to pirate art against the explicit request by an artist to not do so?

Yes, if it’s posted in public, just as it’s ok to pirate games from corporations who don’t want you to do so. If artists want to keep their art private, then go for it! Don’t put it on a public platform. There is still much value in the “original” artwork of artists compared to copies, though obviously less so for digital art. We need only look at the valuations for paintings by famous artists. But copies were always worth less than the originals, and so they should be… especially if the production/distribution costs for copies are approaching zero. Do I think artistseveryone should be paid fairly for their labor? Yes, absolutely. Is copyright the answer to this problem? Absolutely not. It’s fundamentally been co-opted by corporate rent-seekers. Even if it was once designed to protect artists, it’s prime purpose now is corporate profiteering. I’m also curious why “artists” is the hill libs love to die on wrt genAI. Nobody gave a shit when automation was replacing factory and auto workers, but now the comfortable middle class is suddenly affected, you’re all losing your minds.

I think this is a lot more complex and nuanced than either of your are being.

Copying a piece of publicly-accessible art online is an action that occurs without inviting any cost to the artist (unless you’re subscribing to the idea of “lost potential profit”, in which case their criticisms about liberalism would be valid). Many Anarchists consider publicly-placed property to have very low criteria for abandonment, which is I think an important concept that applies here, because art that is placed out on the public web is arguably much closer to being art that’s been placed on the street corner than art that’s e.g. sitting in someone’s living room.

Your argument makes perfect sense for something like hacking into someone’s computer and taking art stored there (which is especially relevant to the discussion of private intimate images). But the kind of durable ownership you’re talking about for scraped media is akin to expecting something placed on a park bench to be left alone rather than consumed as desired. And I think that framing an artist’s request not to touch the publicly-placed, unattended thing, as being a violation of consent is a bit of a perversion of the concept: art is not an extension of the artist’s body, and consent as it applies to one’s person is very specific, whereas you are seemingly combing the colloquial meaning of consent as a general concept, to make “doing anything someone asked you not to” as the same as e.g. sharing intimate images of their body nonconsensually. And an object you produce is never an extension of your body or person.

On the flip side, dismissing all costs that scraping creates as intrinsically acceptable is ignoring the differences between human and bot scraping. Bots interact with web content differently than humans, including doing redundant link spidering, revisits, and content downloads at a (literally) inhuman rate. That has an impact on server performance, which impacts other visitors. It’s perfectly reasonable, and perfectly anarchist, to expect visitors to your space to respect the space and respect other visitors, and scraper bots don’t do that, but keep in mind that scraper bots are not actually LLMs, nor are they actually necessary to build or operate LLMs; they’re a tool being misused by LLM companies.