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Just because you think art isn't actually work and artists don't deserve to be paid for the work they do doesn't make it okay and doesn't make you right.
EldritchFeminity
joined 1 year ago
There's 2 general groups when it comes to AI in my mind: Those whose work would benefit from the increased efficiency AI in various forms can bring, and those who want the rewards of work without putting in the effort of working.
The former include people like artists who could do stuff like creating iterations of concept sketches before choosing one to use for a piece to make that part of their job easier/faster.
Much of the opposition of AI comes from people worrying about/who have been harmed by the latter group. And it all comes down the way that the data sets are sourced.
These are people who want to use the hard work of others for their own benefit, without giving them compensation; and the corporations fall pretty squarely into this group. As does your comment about "small-time creators who suddenly have custom graphics to illustrate their videos, articles, etc." Before AI, they were free to hire an artist to do that for them. MidJourney, for example, falls into this same category - the developers were caught discussing various artists that they "launder through a fine tuned Codex" (their words, not mine, here for source) for prompts. If these sorts of generators were using opt-in data sets, paying licensing fees to the creators, or some other way to get permission to use their work, this tech could have tons of wonderful uses, like for those small-time creators. This is how music works. There are entire businesses that run on licensing copyright free music out to small-time creators for their videos and stuff, but they don't go out recording bands and then splicing their songs up to create synthesizers to sell. They pay musicians to create those songs.
Instead of doing what the guy behind IKEA did when he thought "people besides the rich deserve to be able to have furniture", they're cutting up Bob Ross paintings to sell as part of their collages to people who want to make art without having to actually learn how to make it or pay somebody to turn their idea into reality. Artists already struggle in a world that devalues creativity (I could make an entire rant on that, but the short is that the starving artist stereotype exists for a reason), and the way companies want to use AI like this is to turn the act of creating art into a commodity even more; to further divest the inherently human part of art from it. They don't want to give people more time to create and think and enjoy life; they merely want to wring even more value out of them more efficiently. They want to take the writings of their journalists and use them to train the AI that they're going to replace them with, like a video game journalism company did last fall with all of the writers they had on staff in their subsidiary companies. They think, "why keep 20 writers on staff when we can have a computer churn out articles for our 10 subsidiaries?" Last year, some guy took a screenshot of a piece of art that one of the artists for Genshin Impact was working on while livestreaming, ran it through some form of image generator, and then came back threatening to sue the artist for stealing his work.
Copyright laws don't favor the small guy, but they do help them protect their work as a byproduct of working for corporate interests. In the case of the Genshin artist, the fact that they were livestreaming their work and had undeniable, recorded proof that the work was theirs and not some rando in their stream meant that copyright law would've been on their side if it had actually gone anywhere rather than some asshole just being an asshole. Trademark isn't quite the same, but I always love telling the story of the time my dad got a cease and desist letter from a company in another state for the name of a product his small business made. So he did some research, found out that they didn't have the trademark for it in that state, got the trademark himself, and then sent them back their own letter with the names cut out and pasted in the opposite spots. He never heard from them again!
There was also another patent for a TV with an eye-tracker camera in it to make sure you were actually watching the ads, another one that would unmute itself if it was muted during ads, and one designed to count the number of people in a room to charge you for piracy if you didn't buy enough tickets for everybody for pay per view shows.
What games disable the windows key? As a lefty, this is something I've desired my entire life to the point where I think I'd pass out from the endorphin rush if a game did this.
He was weak, so I destroyed him.
Bros to hoes, guys to gals. What I'm trying to say is and they were roomates.
The Gruesome Story of How Neuralink's Monkeys Actually Died
Elon Musk denies Neuralink monkeys died gruesome deaths, saying they live in 'monkey paradise'
Musk’s Neuralink faces federal inquiry after killing 1,500 animals in testing Note: More than a year old at this point
US Animal Welfare Act links on the National Agricultural Library website
I didn't find any specifics on death rates in my search through the legalese, but I remember reading a comment sometime before Reddit killed third-party apps from somebody who works in a lab with nematodes that animals more complicated than those are regulated strictly enough that even a single death under your watch can be grounds for termination of your license when you get up to monkeys and such.
Part of the reason people have criticized Musk's in particular is because of the high rate of fatalities in the trials on monkeys. I've seen scientists commenting that it should've been pulled after the first death, considering how stringent the requirements for animal testing are, but all those issues and requirements have largely been hand-waved away.
Despite never really having any problem customers in my 14 or so years of working in food service, I'm right there with you. Between the stress of dealing with people day in and day out, working every holiday with no overtime or holiday pay, and being expected to do the work of 2 people and not take any vacation time because "the company can't afford to hire more people," I will never work retail/service again. People talk about dreaming that they're back in high school, I dream that I'm back working there. Even 3 years after I left the industry.
The big issue is, as you said, a capitalism problem, as people need money from their work in order to eat. But, it goes deeper than that and that doesn't change the fact that something needs to be done to protect the people creating the stuff that goes into the learning models. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that datasets aren't ethically sourced and that people want to use AI to replace the same people whose work they used to create said AI, but it also has a root in how society devalues the work of creativity. People feel entitled to the work of artists. For decades, people have believed that artists shouldn't be fairly compensated for their work, and the recent AI issue is just another stone in the pile. If you want to see how disgusting it is, look up stuff like "paid in exposure" and the other kinds of things people tell artists they should accept as payment instead of money.
In my mind, there are two major groups when it comes to AI: Those whose work would benefit from the increased efficiency AI would bring, and those who want the reward for work without actually doing the work or paying somebody with the skills and knowledge to do the work. MidJourney is in the middle of a lawsuit right now and the developers were caught talking about how you "just need to launder it through a fine tuned Codex." With the "it" here being artists' work. Link The vast majority of the time, these are the kinds of people I see defending AI; they aren't people sharing and collaborating to make things better - they're people who feel entitled to benefit from others' work without doing anything themselves. Making art is about the process and developing yourself as a person as much as it is about the end result, but these people don't want all that. They just want to push a button and get a pretty picture or a story or whatever, and then feel smug and superior about how great an artist they are.
All that needs to be done is to require that the company that creates the AI has to pay a licensing fee for copyrighted material, and allow for copyright-free stuff and content where they have gotten express permission to use (opt-in) to be used freely. Those businesses with huge libraries of copyright-free music that you pay a subscription fee to use work like this. They pay musicians to create songs for them; they don't go around downloading songs and then cut them up to create synthesizers that they sell.