this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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Lemme is very pro-piracy so that's kind of a silly statement. It's also worth noting that AI is clearly transformative. Collage is literally legal, how could AI be stealing?
The problem is that it's making the field hyper competitive by "stealing" jobs, but photoshop and photography did this as well in their time.
No one cried about translators losing their niche because of Google since just like generative AI, it benefits society as a whole in the end.
There's a bit of a difference, I'd say. Piracy hurts massive companies that already have tons of money to spare and (to be frank) don't need any more. AI hurts individual artists that barely make a living as is. It's like comparing Robin Hood to whatever the inverse of Robin Hood is (OpenAI, I guess). Point is, I have zero issue with generative AI, I do however have issue with the companies behind it. If all of their data was sourced ethically, and the people creating the training data actually got compensation, I'd be fine with it. Everything can be a tool for high effort and low effort content, it's just increasingly insulting to creators that their work is being stolen and then twisted into something with considerably less effort that makes more money than they could ever hope to make. In other words, dead internet theory.
I mostly agree with what you are saying but I do think sourcing it ethically is a pipe dream.
It's impossible to get all that data from individuals, it's way too complicated. What's already happening is the websites are selling the data and they all have it in their terms of service that they can, even Cara the supposedly pro artist website.
The individuals are not getting compensated and all regulations proposed are aimed at making this the only option. If companies have to pay for all that data while Google and Microsoft are paying premiums to have exclusive access, the open source scene dies overnight.
It really seems to me like there's a media campaign being run to poison the general populations sentiment so AI companies can turn to the government and say "see, we want regulations, the public wants regulations, it's a win win". It's regulatory capture.
I'm also pro piracy and use it myself for all my media. I still consider it theft even if moral but I understand your point about it stealing from artist. I just don't think any current regulation will help artists. Personally, I advocate for copy left licenses for anything that uses public data but I sadly have never seen any proposed law or government document mention it.
I also agree that ethical sourcing is pretty ridiculous given real world constraints, but I'm holding out hope that someone figures it out.
It's not hard to figure out, it's just not economically viable to set up a system for it when the alternative is just not worrying about ethics and doing it anyway. We struggle to get companies to pay slightly more for recycled plastic than virgin plastic, this isn't any different.
By "figure it out" I meant "figure out a way to get big companies on board"
You do that by banning or disincentivising the less ethical option, the moment it's less economically viable, they'll pivot, unless it isn't an option.
The problem being, how do we get it banned?
Extend GDPR or create a similar framework. It's also why I said "or disincentivising", if we can make it a good pr move to license from artists and provide a system to do so through easily while admonishing companies that don't use it we could get the bad pr to be too much compared to weaseling around the licensing