Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

Yes, you are right. But.

People do abuse the protections, which are too lengthy, makes possible to sell rights, etc.

In the end, corporations (ab)uses (buy and sell rights) protections for amassing fortunes much bigger than the original creator ever got. That's not right, not fair, at all. System's broken, need fix, throw it all out and build something new, centered around creators.

Give back to creators only, for less time.

Qualifying this statement by saying this is something I've thought about and this is my own bullshit theory.

There's a limited amount of "attention" on the internet that's available in online art spaces. I theorize that artists need to maintain a public portfolio to find work, either creative work for advertising or entertainment companies or commissions or patreon subscription. You need to be out there for people to hire you if you want to make a living doing art.

AI art is disruptive and harmful to that ecosystem in a few ways. It competes with artists not only for dollars and jobs for commercial art (ie ad agency work), but more fundamentally it competes with artists for attention on the internet, which at a macro scale makes it so there's less money in the system for real artists to practice and master their skills. It's also not necessarily that the AI art is better, it's just good enough to pollute the signal to noise ratio. And as you said, it's fast. That can quickly overwhelm sites like DeviantArt or Art Station, which moves those communities and resources away from their original purpose.

Additionally, AI art models need data from the commons to function. I'm skeptical that synthetic data is good enough to use for improving these models, so theoretically, one of the main ways to improve these models is getting more and better data from humans. If the economy of these models is structured in a way that discourages artists from posting their work publicly, or working at all, then the pace of improvement decreases. I think a lot of artists are pretty pissed off that their work is being used to produce commercial software that creates substitutes for their work without their permission or knowledge.

So that's what I mean by the tragedy of the commons. The online art ecosystem is more fragile than many people think it is and ai companies are over exploiting it. The content remains but the thing you're actually trying to sample, human knowledge and skill, withers on the vine.

> Even if you got your way and all training on copyrighted material was stopped today and all existing models were deleted it would only be a matter of time before we could synthesize arbitrary styles (at least as well as we can today) by identifying and controlling the correct axes in tensor space using a model purely informed by public domain data.

Do it then.

> Your art is mostly not yours, your art is mostly an amalgamation of other people's art which itself is also the same, all the way down. You are a sprinkling of flavor on top. Your art is stolen styles, techniques and vibes mashed together.

Eat shit. People deserve to have some ownership over the product of their labor. Imagine doing all that work to learn all these skills and some rat fuck nerd tells you they have the right to alienate you from that work, making some greasy fucking argument that the multi-billion dollar program they made is doing the same thing you do.

Corporate abuse of copyright isn't an excuse for corporate abuse of people who can actually make things.

You equivocated them.

Yeah but we need the Star Trek society first. In principle, I absolutely agree that IP is bullshit. The problem that many people in the “smash IP” camp tend to ignore is that people needing to eat, have a place to live, not having a stage 1 cancer diagnosis be an instant death sentence, and things like that aren’t merely “regrettable collateral damage” on the road to freeing data.

I’ve encountered many people over the years that hardline shit like that—they’re almost exclusively middle to upper middle class suburbanites that are edge lording that stuff to subconsciously quiet their deep-seated insecurities about how incredibly soft their comparatively unchallenged existence has made them.