That’s no different from how humans learn. People spend years learning to paint in a particular style, and internalize techniques for producing things that are considered aesthetically appealing.

But still we have something that a machine does not: taste, creativity, and imagination. Even before someone learns how to paint, they’re probably coming up with things they would love to be able to make in their head. That’s a reason why a lot of people start studying art in the first place: to be able to put the things in their head down to paper.

AI, so far, is still just a rough imitation of the human mind. It is fundamentally unable to come up with new, creative ideas. It does not have desires, aspirations, it does not love, it does not feel. Thanks to the power of computing, math and statistics, though, it can fool people into thinking there’s something more in the machine than just code and a huge art data set. Props to programmers for making such an awesome illusion. But it’s still just existing artwork, retrieved and remixed as ordered by a human-given prompt. It really fools people, doesn’t it? The day AI becomes self-aware and develops creativity, then maybe we can compare it to our minds.

They signed off with an ad hominem. You win by default.

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.

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.

You think you can use the master’s tools to tear down his house while he just stands idly by and shrugs?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fully agree.

I’m sorry. It looks like we’re working with different definitions of copyright. We’ll just be misunderstanding each other, so please let me know your definition first, in order to move this conversation into a positive direction.

most individual creators do not copyright their works

Source? All works are copyrighted from the moment they’re made, they don’t have to be registered. You’re not being dialectical by saying “well, the petit-bourgeoisie also benefits from it”. While it’s true that individual proletarian creators still have the lower ground in copyright court claims, due to the lawyer purchasing power capitalists have, at the very least it provides a legal ground for defense. Having rules and laws under capitalism is better for everyone, proletarians included, than having none. If you believe a rule-less capitalism would be better, then you’re an anarcho-capitalist. And then, under socialism, there would be many more rules and laws than there are now. If there’s copyright under socialism or not (which historically there has been), that’s a whole different topic because the very law would have a different nature due to the political system in place.

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.

Copyright should be abolished, yes. Under socialism. Under capitalism it’s a double-edged weapon, but it’s one of the only defenses we proletarian creators have against the capitalist class. I would hate it if a capitalist grabbed my music off Bandcamp without my permission and used it for their commercial project without even crediting me. Class perspective.

Even if it was trained with copyrighted artwork without the original artists’ permission and it’s capable of outputting untouched images with the right prompt?

So?

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.

Same. There’s some really cool effects you can get using AI tools, and as an artist I think there’s a lot of applications for this technology, but copyright-infringing art remixers are not where it’s at.

I think the problematic AI tool here isn’t AI that helps artists finish artwork or automate menial tasks, but AI that has been fed with every copyrighted artwork on the internet and is sold as an artist-replacement tool.

Maybe under socialism (and under capitalism too, ideally) it shouldn’t be developed and released as an artist-replacement tool, but as an artist-aiding tool

I’ve been reading this thread and from one communist artist to another, I fully agree with you. I’m on your side. Don’t know wtf is wrong with the other person, they seem to be a materialist reductionist not understanding that we’re trying to improve the human condition, not automate literally everything. It’s sad, but from reading this thread there seems to be a huge dialectical contradiction between artists and programmers in our worldview and goals.

That would be the case if we were talking about artist-aiding AI, not artist-replacing AI. One would be very much welcome to replace the menial aspects of animation, the other would render us moot.

Sucks if you’re an artist but the automobile and steam engine sucked for those whose profession was stabling and shoeing horses too, yet we can’t hold back progress. People will still commission artistic works, it’ll just revert to being very skilled artists and very wealthy people.

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.

Capitalists are not about to allow banning of a cost-cutting measure any more than they would have allowed banning the steam engine or mechanical factories to save the jobs of workers. They’re just not.

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.

My issue with this is that AI art generators are, buzzwords aside, nothing more than fancy human art remixers. Yes, they can grab characters from one style and transform them into another thanks to very complex math, but to make this possible they all make use of a huge database of copyrighted, stolen human art taken without the artists’ permission from the internet. No one asked us if we wanted our art to be assimilated into this monstrosity, and there’s even cases of generators outputting existing artworks virtually untouched, with artist watermarks and all. These art generators are breaking every copyright in the world, but artists alone don’t have much leverage and then nerds try to obfuscate things and make philosophical arguments to justify this. But these are not human artists taking inspiration from existing art and creating something new, it’s a machine remixing copyrighted works taken in without permission as raw material. And then the other issue is that due to the way neural networks work, you can’t ask the generator for its sources on any given output.

So it’s something that shouldn’t be allowed to be released to the public unless it uses only public domain artwork or artwork taken with the artists’ permission. And then it should preferably be able to include sources with the output.

That’s all aside from the economical implications and the effect this is having on the livelihoods of freelance artists everywhere.

Peak American engineering

Another one

As a non-American I find it amazing how, in [current year], after 30+ years of the USSR’s defeat, communism still lives rent free on everyone’s head. I know, I know the State Department is trying to build up this new see see pee bogeyman, but still, you’d think Americans would be more confident about their system being the best and gommunism being dead and buried? The way everyone there hyperfocuses on whatever is going on with official state enemies and no other countries is pretty funny as an outsider.

I don’t know man, telling people in a communist forum to simply click a shortened link is a bit sus

Really interesting. I wonder if the re-blockade at the end of Trump’s term had something to do with it, though that happened in 2020 iirc. From the looks of it, it was really close to being commercialized in the US.

Lmaoooo

I don’t know if I read here or somewhere else that anecdote about communists historically being able to radicalize bourgeois’ children since they often grow up distant from their parents, it comes to mind when reading this

pm_me_elon_musk_pics

Feds love ineffective and idealist “Marxists” that don’t support any actual attempts at anti-imperialism or anti-capitalism, the CIA literally funded Trotskyists, the FBI made up fake “Maoist” and Anarchist groups with headass takes like these, it’s all a psyop to confuse potential communists and remove any hope, inspiration or revolutionary potential they might have.

Yeah I agree

You gotta do what you gotta do. As MLs we know that political power is not handed over but taken by force.

It’s hard, but somehow Hugo Chávez managed to turn the Venezuelan military Bolivarian and anti-imperialist. After a coup attempt.

Well, they’re not a mod, so there’s no way they could be looking at his IP. And the reason he was suspicious was because of his English, that’s pretty racist if you ask me. It’s implying one cannot be possibly able to type perfect English as a native Spanish speaker, like I am.

This thread on r/GenZedong explains a lot of it

According to a Peruvian friend a lot of it was just plain racism and discrimination due to him not being from the capital Lima. Just didn’t want an indigenous man from outside the capital ruling over them.

Class perspective

I’d like to believe he had such intentions in the beginning, particularly together with the Peru Libre party, but: 1. he barely won with less than 1% of vote difference from Fujimori’s daughter, 2. Peru’s establishment is borderline fascistic, racist and Lima-centric, 3. he was blocked from from the beginning from doing any actual changes, probably under death threats, and 4. as a rural ex-teacher with no prior political experience, well, he was just eaten alive, he rapidly capitulated to the right as he fell to pressure to remove every leftist from his cabinet, which was clearly not enough for the establishment, so 5. he was finally forcefully removed and arrested

Damn I should start unironically looking into this.

This is what happens when you try to appease the far-right as a leftist president with no prior political experience

Happy Birthday comrade

It’s so obvious how the first result is propped up there it’s funny

I didn’t study in the US but I just finished university and one of the things I regret is not making more friends. I focused a bit too much on studying and didn’t bother taking the time to meet any of my classmates. That would have helped a lot now that I’m job searching.

I have no idea of how workload-heavy US universities are so I can’t give any advice on that, but one thing that could be general advice is: academically, you’re on your own now. Up until high school, teachers kinda hold your hand sometimes and can be lenient on deadlines and grading; well, in university that’s no longer the case. If you were used to not studying and getting acceptable grades like me, it could be a rude awakening when you realize how easy it is to literally fail, and I mean fail for real. Then, it’s easy to hyperfocus on studying and not socialize like my case.

I will also pass along a quote I read once before starting university myself: it is possible to graduate and not have learned anything. Which means, if you just focus on doing whatever assignment you have to turn in next or acing the next exam, you could end up with a broad but very shallow knowledge of most topics, which depending on your major, could be unfavorable in the end.

Hope it helps