but unfortunately it also doesn’t generate wholly new art, it creates a collage of existing work, but doesn’t attribute any of the art of the other artists used to make it. So even if it were a tool used by artists, it would be effectively stealing art from other artists in the process.
dear fucking god please stop upholding capitalist ideas about IP rights.
I agree, but unfortunately as an artist under capitalism, this is how my fellow artist act. They get incredibly protective of “their style” and it can completely ruin someone’s career if they are accused of “stealing” art. And it’s just kind of rude in general to draw inspiration from something and not attribute the original artist, which was more my original point, that AI art deprives people of the ability to even know who the original artist was. Though the way I phrased it was incredibly poorly worded.
Hot take: Artists should be able to not have their life’s work automatically fed into the plagiarism machine without their compensation or consent. Like I’m not going to pretend that Mickey Mouse being copyrighted for a century is a normal thing, but people having their labor exploited for the profit of the wealthy is kinda the thing we’re supposed to be against, no?
i think you shouldn’t get to opt out of the remix machine but the corporations shouldn’t be able to exploit it for profit exist. Having your work not become part of the commons is the same shit as a century of copyright. Anything we do about these generative models that allows corpos to continue to use them is a bandaid at best.
Well I disagree. You should have a fundamental right to opt out of these things. Even in a perfect world where everything is just and every artist can support themselves, I see no reason it shouldn’t require the creator’s consent. Surely, with no financial pressures to corrupt things, many creatives would willingly contribute to these models, and we wouldn’t need to resort to this ugly, non-consensual scraping.
I just think, fundamentally, there should be some level of control the artist has over these things. You asked me earlier if art should “belong to everyone”, and I guess I don’t think it should, at least not fully or without restriction. I’m not against stuff like fanart and fanfiction and things like that, not in the slightest, but the idea of having my work taken in that way, mechanistically, even in a non-artistic context, like the conversation we’re having right now, feels so thoroughly violating that I just can’t support it. It feels like in the minds of a lot of people, the only option an artist should have to avoid these things, to avoid being scraped, is to seclude themselves, or at least their work, and to completely shut people off from experiencing it. I don’t want that, but I don’t want to be scraped either. Is it so strange? Am I really the weird one for wanting a middle ground, where the humans are allowed to see me and the AI isn’t?
i think that feeling is probably rooted in capitalism and precarity? whatever fan works you’re imagining and fan works “with an advanced computer” are the same.
i do think we should have some protection against e.g. political candidates we don’t endorse using our art, or corporations profiting from our work, but something automatic like how covers work in music seems pretty sane.
Since the Copyright Act of 1909, United States musicians have had the right to record a version of someone else’s previously recorded and released tune, whether it is music alone or music with lyrics. A license can be negotiated between representatives of the interpreting artist and the copyright holder, or recording published tunes can fall under a mechanical license whereby the recording artist pays a standard royalty to the original author/copyright holder […] even if they do not have any permission from the original author.
rare copyright law w.
if somebody wants to make art and not actually share it for metaphysical reasons i really don’t respect that and don’t think shit like city or asinine stunts should be validated, but that’s a huge tangent.
Again, I’m not against any kind of voluntary arragement, but the first part of this comment, the first two sentences, just don’t feel right to me. I’m writing an effortpost as we speak, maybe I’ll put that up later. Still gotta organize my thoughts on that.
This doesn’t sound far off from a Marxist understanding of it, honestly. It’s built off the uncompensated labor of millions of artists. Once in its mature form I’m sure it could be fairly accurately modeled as an enclosure of commons at the very least.
how is it an enclosure? the “original” works are all exactly where they were when they were scraped. (and the “original” of a digital thing is a real fucken weird concept too, the first time that image existed was in the computer’s RAM, or maybe the pixels in a particular state on the artist’s monitor, the one that you see on the internet is like 5 generations of copy already)
like fuck these companies and the peter theil types behind them to death but superman 4-ing fractions of pennies from the take a penny tray isn’t theft just because you do it a billion times, and copying isn’t theft at all.
I think we’re talking past each other. Your argument applies if we’re talking about a liberal concept of ownership, or maybe judging the morality of ai, but that’s unrelated to a material analysis of it. Generative technology requires massive datasets, which are the result of millions of hours of labor. This isn’t a moral claim at all, it’s simply trying to describe the mechanism at play.
Enclosure in the digital space isn’t an exact parallel to enclosure acts in medieval England. I usually see it applied to the Open Source ecosystem: the products of volunteer labor are enclosed or harvested or adopted by private corporations. Google and Microsoft and Apple all built empires on this mechanism.
I mentioned a “mature” stage because I think the next step is more forceful enclosure and hoarding of datasets. The usability of the internet is quickly decreasing in lockstep with the development of AI, a dialectical evolution. It’s eating away at the foundation upon which it builds itself.
dear fucking god please stop upholding capitalist ideas about IP rights.
I agree, but unfortunately as an artist under capitalism, this is how my fellow artist act. They get incredibly protective of “their style” and it can completely ruin someone’s career if they are accused of “stealing” art. And it’s just kind of rude in general to draw inspiration from something and not attribute the original artist, which was more my original point, that AI art deprives people of the ability to even know who the original artist was. Though the way I phrased it was incredibly poorly worded.
Hot take: Artists should be able to not have their life’s work automatically fed into the plagiarism machine without their compensation or consent. Like I’m not going to pretend that Mickey Mouse being copyrighted for a century is a normal thing, but people having their labor exploited for the profit of the wealthy is kinda the thing we’re supposed to be against, no?
does art belong to everyone or not?
i think you shouldn’t get to opt out of the remix machine but the corporations shouldn’t
be able to exploit it for profitexist. Having your work not become part of the commons is the same shit as a century of copyright. Anything we do about these generative models that allows corpos to continue to use them is a bandaid at best.Well I disagree. You should have a fundamental right to opt out of these things. Even in a perfect world where everything is just and every artist can support themselves, I see no reason it shouldn’t require the creator’s consent. Surely, with no financial pressures to corrupt things, many creatives would willingly contribute to these models, and we wouldn’t need to resort to this ugly, non-consensual scraping.
so i should be able to prevent my shit from entering the public domain? how is that different than the mouse?
I just think, fundamentally, there should be some level of control the artist has over these things. You asked me earlier if art should “belong to everyone”, and I guess I don’t think it should, at least not fully or without restriction. I’m not against stuff like fanart and fanfiction and things like that, not in the slightest, but the idea of having my work taken in that way, mechanistically, even in a non-artistic context, like the conversation we’re having right now, feels so thoroughly violating that I just can’t support it. It feels like in the minds of a lot of people, the only option an artist should have to avoid these things, to avoid being scraped, is to seclude themselves, or at least their work, and to completely shut people off from experiencing it. I don’t want that, but I don’t want to be scraped either. Is it so strange? Am I really the weird one for wanting a middle ground, where the humans are allowed to see me and the AI isn’t?
i think that feeling is probably rooted in capitalism and precarity? whatever fan works you’re imagining and fan works “with an advanced computer” are the same.
i do think we should have some protection against e.g. political candidates we don’t endorse using our art, or corporations profiting from our work, but something automatic like how covers work in music seems pretty sane.
rare copyright law w.
if somebody wants to make art and not actually share it for metaphysical reasons i really don’t respect that and don’t think shit like city or asinine stunts should be validated, but that’s a huge tangent.
Again, I’m not against any kind of voluntary arragement, but the first part of this comment, the first two sentences, just don’t feel right to me. I’m writing an effortpost as we speak, maybe I’ll put that up later. Still gotta organize my thoughts on that.
This doesn’t sound far off from a Marxist understanding of it, honestly. It’s built off the uncompensated labor of millions of artists. Once in its mature form I’m sure it could be fairly accurately modeled as an enclosure of commons at the very least.
???
how is it an enclosure? the “original” works are all exactly where they were when they were scraped. (and the “original” of a digital thing is a real fucken weird concept too, the first time that image existed was in the computer’s RAM, or maybe the pixels in a particular state on the artist’s monitor, the one that you see on the internet is like 5 generations of copy already)
like fuck these companies and the peter theil types behind them to death but superman 4-ing fractions of pennies from the take a penny tray isn’t theft just because you do it a billion times, and copying isn’t theft at all.
I think we’re talking past each other. Your argument applies if we’re talking about a liberal concept of ownership, or maybe judging the morality of ai, but that’s unrelated to a material analysis of it. Generative technology requires massive datasets, which are the result of millions of hours of labor. This isn’t a moral claim at all, it’s simply trying to describe the mechanism at play.
Enclosure in the digital space isn’t an exact parallel to enclosure acts in medieval England. I usually see it applied to the Open Source ecosystem: the products of volunteer labor are enclosed or harvested or adopted by private corporations. Google and Microsoft and Apple all built empires on this mechanism.
I mentioned a “mature” stage because I think the next step is more forceful enclosure and hoarding of datasets. The usability of the internet is quickly decreasing in lockstep with the development of AI, a dialectical evolution. It’s eating away at the foundation upon which it builds itself.