You can be poor and creative at the same time. Creativity is not a luxury. For many, including myself, it's a means of survival. Creating gives me purpose and connection to the world around me.

I grew up very poor and was homeless as a teenager and in my early 20s. I still studied and practiced engineering and machine learning then, I still made art, and I do it now. The fact that Big Tech is the new Big Oil is besides the point. Plenty of companies are using open training sets and producing open, permissively licensed models.