this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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“Artists don’t deserve to profit off their own work” is not what anyone said.
Even if people can just take your shit and profit off it - so can you.
This is not a complete rebuttal, but if you need the core fallacy spelled out, let's go slowly.
Why are you entitled to profit off the labor of someone else?
Why am I not entitled to profit from my own work building on stories I enjoy?
Isn't this a completely different conversation than the one we were having and kind of missing the point? Yes, imo you should be allowed to do that. Still, AI Companies are using the labor of millions of artist for free to train their AIs, which are then threatening to eliminate ways of these artist to gather income.
How is that related in any way to the ways that copyright has been exploited against fanmade art?
The conversation began with 'fuck copyright,' so no, restraints on new works are at least as relevant as money.
Restraints on derivative works seem directly relevant to railing against AI training. I don't think fanart goes on your side of the table. You're taking a stand for amateur references to immense professional works. Presumably on the basis that Disney can keep doing its thing no matter how many people draw their own weird Zootopia comics - yeah? I for one would argue the environment someone grew up in is fair game for them to build from, as much for Star Wars as for ancestral fairy tales.
The environment of the internet is a pile of everyone's JPGs. We think nothing of amateur galleries where people mimic popular styles, borrow characters, and draw frankly unreasonable quantities of low-quality pornography. I'm not up-in-arms about AI because it's more of the same. I barely understand the objection. An entity learned English from library books? Yeah, that's how everything that can read English learned to read English. You couldn't understand this sentence without exposure to countless examples of text that were not explicitly provided for your education. So if there's a pile of linear algebra that can emit drawings, and it was shaped by looking at a ton of drawings that other people posted-- then-- as opposed to what?
The economic concerns are simpler: Hollywood is doomed. This is refrigeration, and they sell ice for iceboxes. They imagine it's going to make ice much easier to sell, since they won't need people to harvest and import it. In reality their entire business model is fucked, because their customers also won't need people to harvest and import it.
If they don't need a studio full of artists to make a cartoon movie... neither do you. Neither do all the artists they cast off. We cannot be far from models that tween pretty damn well on their own, and can be guided to tween flawlessly. The near future is not about to have less human art. No more than when Flash obviated colored paint on clear plastic.
Whether or not that's going to make anyone appropriate amounts of money under late capitalism is another question entirely, but it's not like artists were famously well-off before, and in any case Disney delenda est.
Even if text to image generators are able to improve to be better than human artists, people won't stop making art just because a computer can do it faster.
But they will stop hiring artists, and that's more to the point of what they were saying. We're already seeing some jobs being replaced with algorithms (mostly stuff like shitty click bait journalism, but still), and art has long been considered a skill not worth paying for. In centuries past, art used to be something only the rich could afford. Now, people get upset if artists charge $60 for a commission.
The algorithms won't need to produce work better than we can, or even equal. It just needs to make stuff that seems value appropriate. People have already made algorithms to imitate certain popular artists' styles, and they've seen a hit to their income as a result. Why get a commission done from one of them when you can go online and get 50 for free that are kinda close, and then just pick the one you like.
People have been getting automated out of their jobs for well over a century. Technology shouldn't stop advancing; everyone should be compensated for the human labor saved through the use of automation.
What entitles someone to take another person's work and profit off it?
No.
The subject is intellectual property, in general.
Why am I not entitled to share culture?
Why am I not entitled to create, if similarity exists?
Why does someone get to own an idea, just because they wrote it down first?
Is the world's copyright system flawed? Yes. Should it be completely removed? No, because otherwise a lot of creative branches would be unsustainable. Artists need money, musicians need money etc.
I'm not against copyright. I'm trying to guide this other use through why their post is a nonsensical response to someone who is.
If you don't want to defend what you said that's fine but I'm not going to pretend we were actually talking about something else. 🤷♂️ "Share culture" is not when you take someone else's drawing and dropship hundreds of shittily made tshirts on the Facebook marketplace. That's what IP protects artists from and fighting stuff like that takes up a stupid amount of time for anyone that isn't a corporation.
If you are creating that's absolutely fine. But shit you typed into AI isn't creating anything and literally couldn't exist without the people that actually create art.
So you still have no idea what I'm trying to convey here.
You're fixated on one aspect, and ignoring all other consequences. "If you are creating that’s absolutely fine" is NOT what any version of copyright law says. Not ever. So demanding an answer to an explanation of why your first response was a strawman is not the mic-drop you think it is.
Again:
“Artists don’t deserve to profit off their own work” is a position you made up. They're your words. It's a thing you, and you alone, have said. But that's never the same thing as whether anyone else can. This is such a basic 'not-all doesn't mean none' distinction, and it is the only reason I wrote the only words you chose to read.
Look at who they responded to. The statement is not a straan when the person that was responded to doesn't believe in respect the rights of creators.
As if copyright never censors creators.
Fuck your sophistry.
If you don't want to discuss this, leave.