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Screenshot of a tumblr post by hbmmaster:
the framing of generative ai as “theft” in popular discourse has really set us back so far like not only should we not consider copyright infringement theft we shouldn’t even consider generative ai copyright infringement
who do you think benefits from redefining “theft” to include “making something indirectly derivative of something created by someone else”? because I can assure you it’s not artists
okay I’m going to mute this post, I’ll just say,
if your gut reaction to this is that you think this is a pro-ai post, that you think “not theft” means “not bad”, I want you to think very carefully about what exactly “theft” is to you and what it is about ai that you consider “stealing”.
do you also consider other derivative works to be “stealing”? (fanfiction, youtube poops, gifsets) if not, why not? what’s the difference? because if the difference is actually just “well it’s fine when a person does it” then you really should try to find a better way to articulate the problems you have with ai than just saying it’s “stealing from artists”.
I dislike ai too, I’m probably on your side. I just want people to stop shooting themselves in the foot by making anti-ai arguments that have broader anti-art implications. I believe in you. you can come up with a better argument than just calling it “theft”.
Yep. I really hope that the conversation around LLMs moves away from words like "theft". Show me evidence of an artwork that an LLM has concealed artwork from the public. I've looked, and all that I've found is that they make more media more accessible. That's not theft. That's piracy. That's culture-jamming.
So if you want to call it appropriation, fine. It's classic EEE methods, applied to Gonzo, Dada & Punk ideas. Embrace - taking in everything and culture-jamming with meaningless text & images (painfully Dada). Extend - by turning this into both a toy and a corpo "tool", they extended Dada into programming, articles, news media, you name it. Extinguish - when everything is a punk remix, or everything is meaningless Dada, nothing is. Therefore the true punks will be the classicist, reconstructionists, the Bible-beaters, and their ilk. And then Punk is dead.
The world needs more people like you, and I would love hearing more about all this from you 💝!
"AI slop is punk" has the ring of when brew dog claimed they were doing a "punk" equity offering. 😂
Vibe coding is dadaist. If you say so, but I figure intent matters...
Intent matters from the individuals who built the model and trained it. Not from those being jammed. Vibe coders are just tools the artist and punk use to advance the work and the impact.
Intention matters or even, intention is all that matters here. Otherwise a random number generator is dadaist.
RNG only for the sake of RNG can be said to be Dada. The appearance or simulation of intent without practical purposes fits the aesthetic well. The moment it actually serves a practical purpose, it ceases to be. TempleOS' Oracle and the 'particle effect' in Super Mario World are not Dada, but just outputting dev/random could be.
Simulation has merged with the thing being simulated and the simulacra take the originals' places. Nonsense has become the only sense.