Well I was in that cohort and none of us were thinking we were helping megacorps create the content slop machine from 1984.

Our concern was that corporations were expanding the definition of intellectual property to the extent where you couldn't make a movie or song or write a book as an individual without some corporation with a massive "IP" warchest coming after you and declaring it derivative. You couldn't write some software without a corporation with a massive repository of junk patents claiming you infringe.

We wanted to insure that individual creators could continue to have a voice, and not get sued out of existence by an IP Legal/Industrial Complex that was forming causing arms races between megacorps and SLAPs against everyone else.

If we knew we were feeding a yet-to-be-invented slop machine that would allow megacorps to unemploy all the creatives, most of us would not have supported that.

And by the way Disney is all in on AI for the same reason they were all in on perpetual copyright. In the perpetual copyright world, having a massive library of content you no longer have to pay residuals on was a source of massive amounts of "free" revenue. You could just keep re-releasing and re-making stuff. You did not have to do the messy, expensive work of paying people to come up with really good new stuff.

In the AI world, the money-printing capital asset is the trained model that grinds out slop 24/7 and you -emdash- again -emdash- don't have to pay actual people to create anything new.