Who cooked the restaurant meal?

When you order a meal in a restaurant, the food manifests itself through a pattern:

1. You sit down and procure a menu.
2. A waiter asks you for your order.
3. The waiter communicates your order to the kitchen.
4. The kitchen verifies (to the waiter) that the order has been acknowledged.
5. The kitchen prepares the order.
6. The kitchen notifies the waiter that the meal is ready.
7. The waiter serves the meal to the customer.
8. The customer can eat.

And this is just what the customer notices.

Before someone can even order at a stocked restaurant, ingredients need to be ordered, plates and cutlery need to be washed, tables need to be set, and chefs and other staff need training.

OK Mah-Rye-Kuh, where are you going with this?

Getting a meal to a restaurant table is simple for the customer, but it takes effort and sometimes years of training. The process involves wait staff, chefs, cleaners, a bookkeeper, among others.

No customer in their right mind would claim that they cooked the meal themselves.

So why would you claim to have created the text, artwork, or any content that generative AI assembled for you based on content stolen from creators?

Wrap-up

AI models already came by their material through unethical means; don't make it worse by claiming someone else's hard-earned expertise.

Leaving you with the words of someone who was not—contrary to popular belief—Oscar Wilde:

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.

Appendix: Inspiration

Hat-tip to Hugo Visser, who found the comic that inspired this analogy.

Sadly, I could not find a direct link to the source, so you'll have to do with this description:

A comic by Twonks (Steve Nelson) called "AI Design Logic", in which a customer orders a cheese pizza. When the waiter delivers the pizza, the customer says: "Wow, look what I made!"