Everyone’s a property rights absolutist until the rich demand you share with them.

At the end of the day, I think this is the important thing. Arguments about IP and how AI (or AI "artists") affect artists are understandable, but are missing the forest for the trees.

There's one, singular reason art isn't well recognised nor compensated: Capitalism. And so long as it exists, no attitude or approach to AI, no purity filter, no level of enforcement of IP law, is going to effectively protect artists and meaningfully allow them to pursue their work.

"Tabletop gaming startup" has to be a bit. Like there's no way he's getting venture capitalists to invest in Pokémon cards...r-right?

literally

I don't think it is a particularly ineffable quality though? It's art because another human did it, and it really doesn't have to be much deeper than that. That said, I do agree that intellectual property is ultimately blind alley. What most people don't understand is that IP laws are only enforceable in the name of capital.

Unfortunately I think that’s a bit of a liberal argument. It ascribes some ineffable quality to human creativity that AI cannot replicate.

every single time the AI argument comes down to this. "oh you just don't trust AI cos youre a rube who believes in a soul" no motherfucker I'm just not some fucking anti-intellectual who has decided, apropros of NO research into neuroscience, that I know how the brain works and it MUST be analogous to something algorithm based machines can understand

you genuinely don't know what you're talking about, and you have to take so many intellectual shortcuts to derive your position that you are not worth taking seriously

Yeah I think what AI is exacerbating is the tension between creativity and commodity. Businesses don't celebrate art, they seek profits. Images, articles, music, and whatever else are all simply products to sell under capitalism. Turning every artist into a copyright lawyer won't change the fact that their creations are ultimately still commodities.

I see a lot of arguing over the definition of "art" but that's beside the point. The problem is the entire bourgeois concept of property and the way capitalism impoverishes the working class so that they must spend their lives selling their labor.

I disagree that AI is “stealing” for the same reason I don’t think piracy is stealing. It’s true that everything AI produces is inherently derivative. However, intellectual property only exists as a set of market relationships enforced by the state. Even so, I would agree that artists are getting exploited. However, that’s because the market they are forced to engage with is controlled by capital and not because IP is a physical thing that can be stolen.

i mean every booster for AI tech is basically a weird asshole.

if they were smarter and got more personable people to advocate for the tech maybe regular people would hate it less

but instead it's either smarmy techbro psychos or cringe right wing assholes using it exclusively.

That’s what you get when you have a detestable crowd of conmen jumping from hyped thing to hyped thing to try and speculate and con money out of late entrants. It’s the same people, the crypto-bros and wallstreet bets people that go around pushing AI hype and everyone knows it reeks