the most frustrating thing about AI Art from a Discourse perspective is that the actual violation involved is pretty nebulous
like, the guys "laundering" specific artists' styles through AI models to mimic them for profit know exactly what they're doing, and it's extremely gross
but we cannot establish "my work was scraped from the public internet and used as part of a dataset for teaching a program what a painting of a tree looks like, without anyone asking or paying me" as, legally, Theft with a capital T. not only is this DMCA Logic which would be a nightmare for 99% of artists if enforced to its conclusion, it's not the right word for what's happening
the actual Violation here is that previously, "I can post my artwork to share with others for free, with minimal risk" was a safe assumption, which created a pretty generous culture of sharing artwork online. most (noteworthy) potential abuses of this digital commons were straightforwardly plagiarism in a way anyone could understand
but the way that generative AI uses its training data is significantly more complicated - there is a clear violation of trust involved, and often malicious intent, but most of the common arguments used to describe this fall short and end up in worse territory
by which I mean, it's hard to put forward an actual moral/legal solution unless you're willing to argue:
Potential sales "lost" count as Theft (so you should in fact stop sharing your Netflix password)
No amount of alteration makes it acceptable to use someone else's art in the production of other art without permission and/or compensation (this would kill entire artistic mediums and benefit nobody but Disney)
Art Styles should be considered Intellectual Property in an enforceable way (impossibly bad, are you kidding me)
it's extremely annoying to talk about, because you'll see people straight up gloating about their Intent To Plagiarize, but it's hard to stick them with any specific crime beyond Generally Scummy Behavior unless you want to create some truly horrible precedents and usher in The Thousand Year Reign of Intellectual Property Law
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hey! for todays protest, i made this little zine about palestine (holding just simple and basic information).
you can download the zine here, fold it yourself, and distribute it around.
no credit is needed. feel free to leave it around bars, protests, or wherever. simply print it (borderless) and fold it. here is a tutorial on how to do it.
dont stay silent. there is a genocide of horrendous, atrocious proportions going on. also if you are a zionist here to argue with me, i dont plan to entertain you at all, not on my art blog. fuck off, you'll be swiftly blocked. i see enough of you clowns on my main and i have no energy for you. you can skip the death threats too bc i dont give a shit.
(i'm off to get ready for a surgery now, i just wanted to post it before this. if you need anything, i might take a bit to reply)
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world war 3 jokes on twitter meanwhile none of them live in the region and none of them understand the severity of the situation. these next few hours will really determine whether or not we head into a regional war…
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Sometimes you just have one of those moments where the progress we've made as a culture get thrown into stark relief. You look at something and go "Holy shit, that would never have happened when I was a kid."
Today, I had one of those moments when I realized that the teenage boys I'm working with are just. genuinely, openly enthusiastic about going to Build-a-Bear for their outing.
These are sixteen and seventeen year old boys! They just had a whole conversation about what to name their "cute", mostly new squishmallows! They're genuinely excited that they're going to Build-a-Bear this weekend and asking other kids to pick up specific accessories for them!!
Holy shit, that never would've happened when I was 16. None of the boys would have dared to be visibly interested - and neither would most of the girls! There would have been a million gay jokes and "Haha, you're a girl" jokes and "What are you, a baby?" jokes. Teenagers weren't even supposed to care about anything back then!
Less than 15 years later, and I'm watching three 17 year old boys treat all that as not even worthy of comment.
So let's call that a reason for hope. Even when the kids aren't alright, in some ways apparently they are alright. Go Gen Z, honestly. It's so lovely to watch you guys just openly doing and saying stuff that, when I was a teen, would've been a social death sentence.
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