We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Yes, I want artists and other creators to be compensated fairly for any work that they contribute into training datasets, but outside of that there is no moral responsibility AI creators should feel towards those whose potential careers would be impacted.
My guess is that the actual numbers are much lower, like orders of magnitude lower. The U.S. may be dominated by Apple devices, but the rest of the world runs on Windows and Android. 80% of the world population isn't being scammed out of their savings nor are their phones infested with keyloggers and other malware.
You're curious about the non-western perspective? I can tell you that social changes are arriving at a much faster pace in Asia than what we're experiencing in the west. This isn't because the Asian countries are more progressive, but because the baseline was simply lower. The west is indeed in the lead, but most countries are following closely behind, and more importantly, they're all headed in the same direction.
Think about it. Everyone is now consuming the same Tiktok, reddit, Netflix, music, video games globally. Twitter isn't some hidden cove only westerners have access to. The world is following along as George Floyd is brutally murdered in the street. Have you seen Parasite or Squid Game? They deal directly with topics like class struggle / racism and they resonated with people all over the earth. The fact that South Korean media is even producing media such as these would've been unthinkable just 20 years ago. Annual gay parade have started take place in Seoul since 2015, and interracial marriage numbers have never been higher.
I'm sure there are outlier nations who have faced regression in their cultural maturity since, but they're anything but the representative sample and claiming otherwise would be disingenuous. So no, this isn't something cooked up by the bored progressives of the U.S. This is not some obscure domain reserved for the western elites. This is where the world is headed towards - the westerners simply got there before the rest of us.
The way I see it, input being confined to a "text description" is the next immediate problem that needs to be solved. I don't think we can rely on textual inputs for much longer as the human language is too imprecise and/or verbose. It's hard to imagine what exactly the optimal interface would be, but I'm thinking we'll need ways to dictate attributes for each entity being represented, the backdrop, and the view composition all as separate individual components. Ideally all these components can also be reusable and provide reproducibility guarantees without having to share a global "seed" as well.
Upwork is a red herring in this case. As frustrating as it may be that Upwork wasn't more helpful in resolving this case, the current state of affairs is as follows:
1. The author (freelancer) did $12.5k amount of work that he wasn't compensated for
2. The owner of the CC that was "accidentally" charged $12.5k received all their money back through bank dispute
3. Upwork was able to claim their cut for the $12.5k worth of transaction that occurred between the author and Robin
4. Robin received $12.5k amount of work without paying a dime
Robin needs to pay the author back the $12.5k he is owed. If Upwork isn't willing to help reclaim the debt, he needs to sue Robin directly for the amount. It's very strange how much good will the author is willing to show towards Robin given how Robin is the only entity in the story who got away with all the spoils without paying a thing.