I’m trying to place where I fit into the debate around AI art. and I find myself brimming with thought that spill over. and I’m letting them spill forth into this blog.

there’s so many juicy things to sink your teeth into. for one: copyright law, is it just? does it really make sense. obviously it starts to look more and more ridiculous in the face of AI tools, in fact the more we democratize and open the gates to creation copyright becomes less and less sane. it’s the same as regular property. it’s interesting that people who generally skew towards a less capitalistic mindset start lumping around capitalist ideas of property ownership when it starts to feel like their property is being invaded. it doesn’t take much to turn a hardcore punk into a Lars Ulrich. but also we forget how communal the act of making art is. as if it’s really all about the achievements of a singular genius and if we remove all traditional financial incentives no one will be a genius. but what if we are all geniuses? if everyone is a genius. no one is. we must preserve individual exceptionalism if we are to maintain structure in society. does copyright encourage creativity or hold it back? does it foster stronger tighter communities or does is further alienate us from those around us? the anxiety of influence is a potent phrase, so is the death of the author. what is the logical endpoint. But it’s all well and fine to argue about the merits of these types of things in a perfect world in a coding environment like in blender, but when these things manifest in the real world we have to interact with physical laws, and because of those we all need food to eat and places to live.

This brings us to the luddites. who are often misunderstood because of the politicization of the term we use to describe them (sound familiar?). the luddites were not just simply afraid of technology, they were afraid of starving. Their jobs were being automated away and the only method they had to keep from being expendable was to resort to physical violence. but many ideas in common discussion today (socialism, UBI…) have roots in the plight of the luddites. this is the fear that artists are having when they attack AI art. that these tools will be used to get rid of artists, now corporations can just make their own images and don’t need to hire professionals, now consumers don’t need to commission work, they can just type “in the style of ___” and be done with it. and if these tools are trained on the output of those artists it feels even more painful. like training someone to do your job, except that they do it for free and better than you.

but this is very different from the plight of the luddites, who were peasants, who had very little access to education and who also had no safety nets if they were made redundant. Art on the other hand is a very privileged profession. it’s not a skill where you create something that humans physically need. you create something that we can only think about when all our basic needs are met. it’s something that requires hours of practice and training with little to no compensation so you have to have some way to make it through that process and then find rich people to support your art. it requires education, most artists have some form of education and a leg up to get to where they need to be to start making money from art.

now, because of the luddites, and other movements since then, we have more safety nets but not much, so I get it on that level. the safety nets are not where they need to be. but if they were how would that change this situation? would artists care about these tools if we had a UBI that took care of basic necessities? yes and no probably.

Some against the AI image generators merely argue that artists should just be compensated for their work being included in the training data, and be allowed to opt out. So, if we extrapolate that out it sounds like if AI art was somehow getting more artists paid we’d all be ok with it. while I think that would be correct to some degree, it also has the ring of someone asking you how much you’d like to be compensated to never create art again. and that’s not even mentioning how complex the issue is of deciding how much each artist should be getting paid for their work to be included in these data sets (which, no matter how you do the math, wouldn’t be very much).

Like most arguments, it feels like the thing that we’re mostly upset about is not the real issue. The issue to me is about the process for ascribing a price to priceless things in a society that demands that we quantify everything so we can maximize the numbers that we deem most advantageous to ourselves (i.e. wealth, whatever that is). In other words it’s a meaning crisis.

Capitalism forces us to make so many mental contortions to make sense of ourselves in the world that we often can’t tell up from down. And this is another instance. But like the internet itself, AI tools are a giant magnifying glass that reveal just how crazy our system is. We desperately want the solution to present itself in a simple 3 step process, but we can’t even begin to define a treatment until we can clearly determine the cause of the symptoms. and to do that we need to see what’s actually going on. And what’s actually going on is that the old models for how we distribute resources and assign meaning/value to things doesn’t hold up in the face of new technologies.