[anileated]

Scale makes things different.

You can hire people to scrape the Internet for artwork and then produce images in arbitrary styles (same for text), but you would need to constantly pay them wages (benefitting their lives, reducing unemployment, injecting money into the economy) and you can only do so much. If they become good enough they will just quit and live off freelance commissions.

Similarly, if you hire low-paid people to canvas the city for rent prices, and yet more people to aggregate them without any ML, chances are one of them is renting and will raise the question with the authorities, and also why not just drop off to start own real estate agency with all that data.