I think that's quite different, though. If someone is currently doing paid labor, they indeed can't just quit in most cases, because they depend on the income.

But there's no such thing with volunteering to try a new service. That's just something people do because they feel like it, are bored, enjoy it in their spare time?

Unless those artists depended on (free) access to the model for monetization purposes. There have been some AI videos popping up in Youtube and other platforms. Creating a video using traditional CGI techniques is many orders of magnitudes more work than writing (even pages of) prompts.

To that, I will add that there is a large market for content outside mainstream media[^1]. I'm sure there are creative folk out there which are not visual artists as their main thing[^2], but can use cheap visual art coming from AI to generate some sort of income...

[^1]: See, for example, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/data-an...

> That's just something people do because they feel like it, are bored, enjoy it in their spare time?

It's an emerging technology and platform. There are economic advantages to having early access to learn what it can do.

Furthermore, this specific colunteer program appears to have an associated contest that pays creators who win. Thus you have a lot of volunteers, limited under NDA, being pushed to compete for vert limited renumeration for their efforts. I doubt most of the volunteers are bored people doing it as a hobby.