I mean, most people can't recognize slop vs creativity normally. I think the results affect less the anthropomorphizing issue, since oir brains do run similar predictive processes in how we generate words based on context,
Although it can't actively update its weights while navigating novel concepts, which is why you need a person to create novelty alongside the tool, or correct its mistakes, much like when you say the wrong thing and backtrack and correct. Your word generating process isn't perfect, but it's a useful tool that is useful alongside all of your other 'tools.'
What i think the study is a better answer to is the people who call it a theft machine because it learned from things that exist.
That being said, rich assholes should not be able to turn around and claim ownership of the result of the learning based on the collective development and accomplishment of mankind, or life more broadly. We 'steal'. A lot of useful intelligent tools from nature.
It's hard to start that conversation though when the 'bad' thing they are doing is just learning or training.
We had the slop of 90s-2000s Disney sequels, even if it was a bunch of human interns having their time and energy pilfered with the threat of basic survival or right to spend time creating art instead of flipping burgers. All proper and copyright safe, but closer to the actual problem than some artists trying to actually create novel things with these models replacing the Disney interns that only Disney has 'rightful' access to, despite gaining success off of public domain, and then lobbying to shrink the public domain.
But people are more eager to be mad at the technology than the complexity of dealing with the opportunistic assholes that will use every tool, technology or otherwise, to ensure they get to have power over our collective rights and autonomy.
You're even being downvoted for an entirely sensible opinion. I feel like the type of people to downvote this opinion are the type who don't comprehend that boardrooms were creating slop using real artists that they control through economic suppression. The bigger issue is that most consumers don't have the media literacy to tell what is slop with a lot of money put into it verses the quality that independent artists are able to put out when they can't afford a team of economic slaves to polish their work, and the lack of media literacy drowns them under the salience and market dominance of Disney and Warner types.
But if an indie dev uses a local AI to accomplish the same polish that is currently only available to big corpos, they could actually make their real artwork look more competitive with corpo slop,
But people don't have the literacy on 'why' AI bad, the same way people don't seem to have literacy around opportunistic oligarchs buying the whole political landscape giving you a choice between mask off corpo leaches promising things antithetical to their actions, and mask on corpo leaches pretending to combat it. The solution weirdly isn't "burn the technology." much like the phones in our pockets, there is zero reason for them to be useless bricks outside of the proprietary data collection and gambling pipeline that has been deemed the "only safe option" as if a Linux equivalent is more dangerous than the corpo data collection and limiting of our own autonomy over our own devices.
Similarly the cloud, which is literally just "let us organize all of your local data for you on our computers. Keeping your data with us is just easier or something." rather than just enabling people in their own local networks.
So the landscape being built for us is the problem, but we can't get there when most people can't spend more time absorbing a topic before taking the strong socialized beliefs that are given high emotional salience, because they socially feel that it is bad, not because of the decades of encroaching systemic oppressing that we have to crawl out of.
It's not the indie artist using a tool that's the problem, and that tool is stealing nothing from anyone, rather than using systemic exploitation as righteous artistic accomplishment like pretty much anyone with actual money for "labour."