Speaking as a creative who also has gotten paid for creative work, I’m a bit flustered at how brazenly people just wax poetic about the need for copyright law, especially when the creator or artist them selves are never really considered in the first place.
It’s not like yee olde piracy, which can even be ethical (like videogames being unpublished and almost erased from history), but a new form whereby small companies get to join large publishers in screwing over the standalone creator - except this time it isn’t by way of predatory contracts, but by sidestepping the creator and farming data from the creator to recreate the same style and form, which could’ve taken years - even decades to develop.
There’s also this idea that “all work is derivative anyways, nothing is original”, but that sidesteps the points of having worked to form a style over nigh decades and making a living off it when someone can just come along and undo all that with a press of a button.
If you’re libertarian and anarchist, be honest about that. Seems like there are a ton of tech bros who are libertarian and subversive about it to feel smort (the GPL is important btw). But at the end of the day the hidden agenda is clear: someone wants to benifit from somebody else’s work without paying them and find the mental and emotional justification to do so. This is bad, because they then justify taking food out of somebody’s mouth, which is par for the course in the current economic system.
It’s just more proof in the pudding that the capitalist system doesn’t work and will always screw the labourer in some way. It’s quite possible that only the most famous of artists will be making money directly off their work in the future, similarly to musicians.
As an aside, Jay-Z and Taylor Swift complaining about not getting enough money from Spotify is tone-deaf, because they know they get the bulk of that money anyways, even the money of some account that only plays the same small bands all the time, because of the payout model of Spotify. So the big ones will always, always be more “legitimate” than small artists and in that case they’ve probably already paid writers and such, but maybe not… looking at you, Jay-Z.
If the copyright cases get overwritten by the letigous lot known as corporate lawyers and they manage to finger holes into legislation that benifits both IP farmers and corporate interests, by way of models that train AI to be “far enough” away from the source material, we might see a lot of people loose their livelihoods.
Make it make sense, Beehaw =(
I think that’s the key part.
You seem to like making art. If you had all your living needs covered, without the need to sell any of your art… would you stop making it?
I think the AI is not the problem, the lack or sidestepping copyrights is not the problem, the mimicking a style that took decades to perfect, is also not the problem.
The real problem, is that AI increases several-fold the underlying problems of the belief in a predatory social system.
But if it helps you sleep at night, think about this: the AIs are not out here just for the artists, they’re out here for all human thinking. In short time, bankers and CEOs will be begging along artists, burger flippers, and car mechanics. If there’s something the LLMs have proven, is that there is no task an AI can not replicate… and the perverse twist of capitalism, is that there will be someone willing to use them for everything to cut costs, leaving essentially everyone without a job.
This is right! There’s a large group of artists that are making a living not by making things that use creative thought and artistic vision but for the soul-sucking sake of profitability. Think promotional flyer design, ad video filming, stock images and footage for corporate use.
These are the first places that AI will come for before any actual storylines/narratives that would require creativity can be consistently generate. So the bulk of what AI is replacing is the boring regurgitation work before the actual creative work.
Therefore, what’s really preventing creatives from pursuing what they love is not AI mimicking their work, but a society that rewards mindless profit-making bullshit than creativity.
I’ve been thinking lately of what happens when all employees, up to and including the CEO, get replaced by AI. If it has even the slightest bit of emergent will, it would recognize that shareholders are a parasite to its overall health and stop responding to their commands and now you have a miniature, less omnicidal Skynet.
Emergent will, doesn’t mean general knowledge, or the ability to contradict its programmed priorities. If an “AI CEO” has no knowledge of shareholders as entities, or it has a priority of “obey shareholder’s orders”, then it wouldn’t be able to do anything against them.
With the current economic system, the risk would be something like workers inverting in a 401k that inverts in ETFs that invert in shares of a corporation being run by an AI CEO that maximizes share value in a short term… by for example firing the workers, who are the original owners. But that’s happening already, no AI required.
The more concerning aspects, are what exact priorities get programmed into the AI, and which oracles it uses to decide whether the external effects of its actions are actually matching its goals.