As an artist, I think it is a net negative for us. Disregarding the copyright issue, I think it’s also consolidating power into large corporations, going to kill learning fundamental skills (rip next generation of artists), and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job. Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it’s a pretty depressing future for us. Anways thoughts?
Can’t believe I’m reading this take on a communist website. If you’re arguing from a capitalists’ standpoint, then there’s the counterpoint that the existing art generators are full of copyrighted artwork taken without the authors’ permission, and so they should be deemed illegal (this would be true under socialism as well tbf). Then further generators would only be allowed to use either public domain or properly licensed artwork as its training set, which will inevitably lower the variety and quality of the outputs (sorry programmers).
From a communist standpoint we should stand in solidarity with the artists whose livelihoods are being put in risk and oppose unethical AI art.
This is fundamentally different because the generators were fed basically every artwork on the internet, no matter if they were copyrighted or not, in order to make the thing work. They should have never been able to become public services, much less PAID services, and should have been restricted to academic circles as proofs-of-concept, due to the blatant and massive copyright infringement taking place. This is allowed to go on because artists are usually poor and have no individual leverage, but say, if tomorrow an AI movie generator was released that was fed every Hollywood movie ever and could output a Marvel-quality blockbuster with just a prompt and enough time, believe me, shit would be sued to destruction in days.
Artists should be collectivizing right now and preparing a lawsuit against those operating AI art generators fed on their copyrighted artwork. So yes, the proverbial machine can be smashed in this case, if only because it infringes copyright law in such a massive way.
Copyright is bad actually and should be abolished. It constrains creative potential and is a relic that has been weaponized under late capitalism to an extreme end. Intellectual property is disgusting nonsense.
Why should a genius invention that derives from an earlier idea entitle the holder of the earlier idea to all the money or most of it? Why should someone who sits on something they filed be able to demand someone who comes up with a practical use for it pays them money?
And why should someone’s kids or estate or some company be able to hold the rights to someone’s art and charge royalties for decades after their death?
We should have publicly funded research universities and laboratories that should churn out ideas for all to use and take in whatever direction they’d like.
I agree the capitalists are ignoring their own rules to plunder and create a machine for creating money without (as much) labor but they’ve never really been strict about following their own rules and it’s kind of an odd move to whine that they’re dishonest and not following the capitalist IP theory and rulebook.
You think you can use the master’s tools to tear down his house while he just stands idly by and shrugs? It’s possible they could win a short-term victory but you are using the bourgeois legal system under the bourgeois government. But only if the bourgeois think they can use it exploit the proletariat further, to impoverish and hurt most people. If need be they could arrange very cheap licensing or hire artists to feed the machine, you’d at most set them back a bit. They can after all draw from many public domain artworks from dead artists, from artwork done by corporate artists under contract, and so on and so forth. Consider the manga artist who creates for some publication. They license all their work to them and that corporation can form an agreement to sell access for fractions of a cent per drawing to AI generators, perhaps in the hope of replacing their artists someday or perhaps just for some quick cash.
And it’s an odd legal argument you need make in service of it too. Can artists sue other artists who as art students studied their art for techniques which they copied? That’s what the AI company lawyers will say. Because the AI is doing something similar though a bit more direct. You can’t point to an exact lifting from a given work so much as broad learning from styles, trends, and themes and re-using them.
But all of art for all of human history has been taking from others, their themes, themes in nature, inspirations, idols looked up to. Which is why I find this idea dangerous. If the art was available for public viewing, is an artist who looks through deviant-art profiles and learns a style from them and then opens their own store a thief as well? Why not?
I’d almost fear more a ruling in the favor of the artists to prevail against that argument, a nightmarish dystopia where you’re fined or billed for your eyes wandering to a copyrighted work that you haven’t subscribed to a plan to view. A total monetization of all art, ideas, etc to an extreme draconian degree.
I agree that copyright has been perverted into a capitalist device that hampers creativity and innovation in current society, but look at how socialist countries have implemented the law and you’ll see it’s not an inherent contradiction, especially in the earlier stages of socialism. Just to be clear, I’m not in favor of Mickey Mouse law. Shit has to be regulated up to a rational point. But as I said somewhere else, if I, as a struggling artist, make something and upload it online just to show people, I don’t want some huge corporation to grab it and monetize it without my consent or approval, or a bigger, more popular artist to claim it as theirs, make money off it, and not even give me credit. That’s what would happen if we abolished copyright now, under capitalism, it would be a free-for-all, plain anarchy. Like it or not but it also keeps blatant robbery in check, under the current system. I strongly believe there would be laws with a similar good-faith purpose under socialism, with numerous clauses and exceptions so they couldn’t be abused.
It might sound idealistic and I don’t think it will be the end of the struggle, but it’s one of the only legal devices we have against them under the current system. Collectively we could achieve a lot as well.
I guess so. It’s still worth fighting for. Pure cynicism isn’t gonna help the socialist cause. We want revolution, or fixing the cause of the illness, but waiting for ideal conditions will only prolong people’s suffering right now.
I can see where you’re coming from but I don’t buy the sci-fi hypothetical dystopian scenario as an argument in favor of AI art. Outlandish logical conclusions are also how liberals claim “authoritarianism” would end, but I digress.
And the human artist’s lawyer will say: one is a human taking inspiration from another human and making something creative out of it, the other is a computer program remixing existing artwork but not adding anything creative on top of it. Therefore it’s a purely derivative work. Some lawyers have already said it, AI art can’t be copyrighted because there’s no original creation involved.
Another way of seeing it would be if I made a sculpture and claimed copyright, then someone else started making 3D printed versions of the sculpture in random colors. I still hold the copyright to the underlying artwork, while the other person could maybe hold copyright to the application of a different material and coloring.
Again, sorry if it appears to you that I’m working under a capitalist copyright framework, but we live in a capitalist world and we’re even more fucked if we don’t even try to fight legally for the few rights we have. Cynicism helps the enemy in this case since it translates into inactivity. The nature of copyright itself and the question of its existence under socialism is a whole different topic. Let’s not fall into the “ideological purity” trap either.
Well said, from my understanding, unless UBI is a thing under socialism (which it shouldn’t be?) copyright laws would still be needed for the artist to make a living, no?
There’s no difference between a human looking at a piece of art or an AI doing it. I’m a human, and the art I create is influenced by art I’ve seen. It took Gundam to show me the beauty in cargo lifts.
There is a difference. You’re a human, not a machine. Don’t compare yourself to one. We artists don’t compare ourselves to them, either. But you’re right in that, to a layperson, AI art seems to evoke the same emotions as human art. But you know why that is? Because AI art is also human art, just remixed by a machine. The problem is that the machine can’t tell you its sources because either the programmers didn’t care about coding in credits and only took copyrighted artwork in bulk as raw material, or it’s very hard for the neural network algorithm to tell you how it came up with an output.
On the topic of inspiration, we as artists love it when other artists are influenced by us. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” as they say. If another artist likes us they’re also a fan. That’s great. But we’re not fond of an AI pretending to be us in front of non-artists, because 1. it’s just a program that took our art (without permission) from its database because it was tagged as appropriate, and 2. it doesn’t even give us credit. I mean, as far as we know, the programmers who coded the AI didn’t even take one look at our art, they just mass downloaded whole websites and our art came along with them. We don’t like that.
Edit: Whoever downvoted me, at least refute my points.
I’m an artist. It’s my full time job.
So?
These quotes all to me sound like you’re implying I’m not, and therefore my opinion is less valid.
Sorry, I was multitasking when I wrote that post and forgot that part. If you as an artist are alright with an AI assimilating your art, you could be one of the people donating their artwork to train an ethically-sourced dataset. It should be consensual like that.
Don’t worry, he isn’t an artist.