Culture, at large, should be accessible by as a larger number of people as possible.
I personally believe there are situations where pirating copyrighted content is acceptable:

• Piracy for "checking out" a thing and see if you like it before buying it / supporting the creator is always okay.
• When it comes to small creators, indie companies, people and organizations for whom that money does make a difference, supporting them financially is always the best choice, as long as you can afford to.
• When it comes to large corporations that actively make a large amount of profit, piracy is usually okay. Pirates make but a small percentage of their user base. The Pokemon Company won't care if you don't buy their latest game. They grossed 11.6 billion dollars just from licensed goods in 2022.
• Piracy for emulation purposes is always okay. Fuck Nintendo and fuck games from 20 yrs ago being sold at the same price they were sold back then.
• When actively boycotting a company, piracy should be avoided as well - or if you do pirate and enjoy their products, avoid talking about them with other people. This will still give them exposure and good publicity. Piracy isn't always detrimental to a company.
• Adobe software must always be pirated. Follow the ancient law.

The use - and sometimes, existence - of generative AI models is a controversial one, especially in spaces dedicated to art and hobbies - and for good reason!
It's a conversation I'm personally invested in, myself. Though I don't do it under this name, I currently make money by doing art commissions - so I might be a bit biased about this.
I believe that, currently, generative AI can be very detrimental to us artists. Not because of any inherent fault of this kind of technology, but because of the way it was trained.
I myself have contrasting thoughts about it: on one hand, I'm not a big supporter of copyright as a whole. On the other, I percieve the fact that these models have been trained on massive amounts of data without any consent to be an injustice. Doubly so when they're then used to put the creators of said data out of work.
It's still something I'm ruminating over. It's hard to get over the gut feeling of fear when you're an artist. For many months, I actively avoided using AIs at all.
Then I realized it was just... my mind completely rejecting the very idea of it because I was scared. And suddenly another fear grabbed me: that of becoming old, not in body but in soul - scared of any new technologies, refusing to even touch anything that wasn't invented before I turned 25.
So I stopped being scared and I started playing. I'm still very critical about the use of AI for generating creative content, like visual art. But...

I feel very differently about using AI for generating a bit of HTML or JS.
For one - I don't feel like any creative rights are being infringed. Massive amounts of code of any kind are being freely shared online.
Places like Stackoverflow tend to be concerned about use of AI not because it infringes on anyone's rights or hard work, but rather because of how often it just... spews out bad, wrong, nonsense code.
As well as - it's kind of in the nature of code to be copied and repurposed. You see a website doing something really neatly, go into the source code, and look up how they did it. Or, you search online how other users went about it. My previous website used to be a collage of tidbits I got from around the web!

This meme, except the designer is absolutely in the right!
though html is not a programming language, I know my place :')

Using generative AI was insanely helpful for me as I rehauled this website.
The way I am, I tried to study DHTML in a structured way countless times during these last couple years. But mantaining focus for me is especially tough. I learn best by doing - but I felt like I needed a more structured approach.
So - I studied the basics of HTML and CSS on my own, thanks to the countless amazing resources available online! And I started to re-build this website from the ground up.
However, many times, I'd find myself stuck on a problem, or wondering how to best approach a solution. Instead of spending hours googling it, I started to ask ChatGPT about it. Our conversations would go with me asking help in solving a specific issue, and it providing code. I would then get curious, and ask about how that specific code worked and why, and if there were other ways to go about it, etc. And so, I ended up learning things bit by bit.
I also asked ChatGPT to write some simple JavaScript for some simple interactive elements I really wanted to incorporate ASAP. I've come to realize it has some big limitations - as trying to get it to write anything more complex was a lost cause anyways. But it just gives me more motivation to learn how to use it myself, knowing I have a digital helping hand if I get stuck on something.

Why AI? Why not ask a human being?
Honestly, man. Socializing is hard as hell for me. When I want to lose myself in a hobby, I like to be on my own! It just makes me happy. I can ask the most basilar, asinine questions to a piece of software. I can ghost it for weeks. It's just a great learning companion for this specific use case of mine!

In the end, having a hobby means having fun with it! If you're not having fun - you're doing that hobby wrong. I realized I was doing this hobby wrong. I changed the way I go about it. I don't think the current way I do it causes anyone harm - at most, it might make some people a bit grumbly. But it's my hobby, and I'm happier for it.

All in all - I like new things. I like technology. I'm not interested in having an "old school" site because things were better in the past. I'm not fascinated by the past, in itself. I'm here because I like creating things.

I'm not interested in being a technological reactionary for the sake of it. I can be critical of technologies - old an new ones alike - when I feel like they are being used to directly or indirectly harm people, or make someone's life worse. I find AI a neat tool to aid in creating many things, and I'm likewise critical about its use for creating other things, such as visual art, music, photographs, voices.