@pmb00cs @AuthorJMac image generation also has the advantage that some level of detail doesn’t matter. (Like, usually, the detail that JPEG compression throws away.) But they are useful; if they weren’t the copyright infringement wouldn’t matter. I was saying it’s only technologically feasible because it can be done as pure data with no physical paintbrush, not that doing so without licensing the inputs is acceptable - it’s not
@pmb00cs @AuthorJMac somewhere recently I posted that we should have an image format that includes the alt-text, so uploading an image will bring the alt-text with it by default; now I want to add to that that some provenance metadata should also be standardized and included, so hosts like mastodon instances can refuse to allow images that don’t have adequate attribution