There are a lot of things it seems only rich people can do and get away with. It doesn't mean I support it or want them to do it, but that seems to be the reality.

If I may make an analogy, it would be like looking at rich corporations dumping toxic chemicals into our waterways, and saying "wow I wish I could dump toxic chemicals in the water too, not fair!"

The point is that if a rich person wants to do it, my only hope is that they have to spend a significant amount of their resources to do it, and that there would be immense negative social pressure against them when they do.

OpenAI never gave the community the weights. They always intended to monopolize it for corporate extortion, they didn't "democratize" shit.

There are open-source alternatives:

https://mochi1ai.com/

https://wan.video/

and others. There are free to use tools also.