Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey are suing OpenAI and Meta over violation of their copyrighted books. The trio says their works were pulled from illegal “shadow libraries” without their consent.
in design school, I had to pay for the books I bought which contained the images of the art. whomever owns those images got paid for the license to appear in the book. when I go to museums, I had to pay (by admission price or by the tax dollars that go into paying for the museum’s endowment), and that pays for the paintings/sculptures/etc.
whenever I saw or see art, in one context or another, there’s some compensatory arrangement (or it’s being/has been donated— in which case, it’s tax-deductible).
edit: then again, my work is not a remixed amalgam of all of the prior art I consumed— unlike AI, I am capable of creating new unique works which do not contain any of the elements of original works I may be seen or learned from previously. I am able to deconstruct, analyze, and implement nuanced constructs such as style, method, technique, and tone and also develop my own in the creation of an original work without relying on the assimilation and reuse of other original works in part or whole. AI cannot.
for this reason I find this a flawed premise— comparing what an artist does to what LLMs or AI do is logically flawed because they aren’t the same thing. LLMs can only ever create derivative works, whereas human artists are capable of creating truly original works.
In all those instances you paid for the physical resources.
These AI are just automating remix culture.
Human creations should be free for all of us to use where possible (e.g. material costs for say a book).
In all those instances you paid for the physical resources.
not only the physical resources but also the licensing fees for the images and the labor required to research and assemble the books. none of that was free, either. some of those design texts were hundreds of dollars-- and, no, I’m not referring to your bullshit college textbooks that have meaningless markups.
while I agree with the philosophy that all human knowledge should be free and that we should all have free access to art and media and whatever, I’m simply explaining that I did, in fact, as an art/design student studying art/design pay for the material I learned from, including the art to which I was exposed (or there was some other form of compensation involved). i am not arguing whether or not that should or should not be the case.
i also made a clear distinction between what a human artist is capable of achieving and what an ai is capable of achieving. perhaps I should have continued to state that it for this season that I believe artists should be compensated when AIs train using their works/data due to the difference between how they use it and how a human artist uses it when creating original works vs ai-generated pieces.
Except you didn’t pay for generations of art culture endemic to human nature that took us from cave paintings to lying buttresses to modern design
Everything is a remix. Including all the work you’ve ever done. And everything I’ve ever done. Nothing is wholly original.
