#artificial intelligence used

[artistformerlyknownasbutttrumpet]

no i don't want to use your ai assistant. no i don't want your ai search results. no i don't want your ai summary of reviews. no i don't want your ai feature in my social media search bar (???). no i don't want ai to do my work for me in adobe. no i don't want ai to write my paper. no i don't want ai to make my art. no i don't want ai to edit my pictures. no i don't want ai to learn my shopping habits. no i don't want ai to analyze my data. i don't want it i don't want it i don't want it i don't fucking want it i am going to go feral and eat my own teeth stop itttt

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Penguin Random House, AI, and writers’ rights

NEXT WEDNESDAY (October 23) at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, GEORGIA, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

My friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden is a wellspring of wise sayings, like "you're not responsible for what you do in other people's dreams," and my all time favorite, from the Napster era: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side."

The record labels hated Napster, and so did many musicians, and when those musicians sided with their labels in the legal and public relations campaigns against file-sharing, they lent both legal and public legitimacy to the labels' cause, which ultimately prevailed.

But the labels weren't on musicians' side. The demise of Napster and with it, the idea of a blanket-license system for internet music distribution (similar to the systems for radio, live performance, and canned music at venues and shops) firmly established that new services must obtain permission from the labels in order to operate.

That era is very good for the labels. The three-label cartel – Universal, Warner and Sony – was in a position to dictate terms like Spotify, who handed over billions of dollars worth of stock, and let the Big Three co-design the royalty scheme that Spotify would operate under.

If you know anything about Spotify payments, it's probably this: they are extremely unfavorable to artists. This is true – but that doesn't mean it's unfavorable to the Big Three labels. The Big Three get guaranteed monthly payments (much of which is booked as "unattributable royalties" that the labels can disperse or keep as they see fit), along with free inclusion on key playlists and other valuable services. What's more, the ultra-low payouts to artists increase the value of the labels' stock in Spotify, since the less Spotify has to pay for music, the better it looks to investors.

The Big Three – who own 70% of all music ever recorded, thanks to an orgy of mergers – make up the shortfall from these low per-stream rates with guaranteed payments and promo.

But the indy labels and musicians that account for the remaining 30% are out in the cold. They are locked into the same fractional-penny-per-stream royalty scheme as the Big Three, but they don't get gigantic monthly cash guarantees, and they have to pay the playlist placement the Big Three get for free.

Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

In a very important, material sense, creative workers – writers, filmmakers, photographers, illustrators, painters and musicians – are not on the same side as the labels, agencies, studios and publishers that bring our work to market. Those companies are not charities; they are driven to maximize profits and an important way to do that is to reduce costs, including and especially the cost of paying us for our work.

It's easy to miss this fact because the workers at these giant entertainment companies are our class allies. The same impulse to constrain payments to writers is in play when entertainment companies think about how much they pay editors, assistants, publicists, and the mail-room staff. These are the people that creative workers deal with on a day to day basis, and they are on our side, by and large, and it's easy to conflate these people with their employers.

This class war need not be the central fact of creative workers' relationship with our publishers, labels, studios, etc. When there are lots of these entertainment companies, they compete with one another for our work (and for the labor of the workers who bring that work to market), which increases our share of the profit our work produces.

But we live in an era of extreme market concentration in every sector, including entertainment, where we deal with five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad-tech companies and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks. That concentration makes it much harder for artists to bargain effectively with entertainments companies, and that means that it's possible -likely, even – for entertainment companies to gain market advantages that aren't shared with creative workers. In other words, when your field is dominated by a cartel, you may be on on their side, but they're almost certainly not on your side.

This week, Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the history of the human race, made headlines when it changed the copyright notice in its books to ban AI training:

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/penguin-random-house-underscores-copyright-protection-in-ai-rebuff

The copyright page now includes this phrase:

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

Many writers are celebrating this move as a victory for creative workers' rights over AI companies, who have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in part by promising our bosses that they can fire us and replace us with algorithms.

But these writers are assuming that just because they're on Penguin Random House's side, PRH is on their side. They're assuming that if PRH fights against AI companies training bots on their work for free, that this means PRH won't allow bots to be trained on their work at all.

This is a pretty naive take. What's far more likely is that PRH will use whatever legal rights it has to insist that AI companies pay it for the right to train chatbots on the books we write. It is vanishingly unlikely that PRH will share that license money with the writers whose books are then shoveled into the bot's training-hopper. It's also extremely likely that PRH will try to use the output of chatbots to erode our wages, or fire us altogether and replace our work with AI slop.

This is speculation on my part, but it's informed speculation. Note that PRH did not announce that it would allow authors to assert the contractual right to block their work from being used to train a chatbot, or that it was offering authors a share of any training license fees, or a share of the income from anything produced by bots that are trained on our work.

Indeed, as publishing boiled itself down from the thirty-some mid-sized publishers that flourished when I was a baby writer into the Big Five that dominate the field today, their contracts have gotten notably, materially worse for writers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/19/reasonable-agreement/

This is completely unsurprising. In any auction, the more serious bidders there are, the higher the final price will be. When there were thirty potential bidders for our work, we got a better deal on average than we do now, when there are at most five bidders.

Though this is self-evident, Penguin Random House insists that it's not true. Back when PRH was trying to buy Simon & Schuster (thereby reducing the Big Five publishers to the Big Four), they insisted that they would continue to bid against themselves, with editors at Simon & Schuster (a division of PRH) bidding against editors at Penguin (a division of PRH) and Random House (a division of PRH).

This is obvious nonsense, as Stephen King said when he testified against the merger (which was subsequently blocked by the court): "You might as well say you’re going to have a husband and wife bidding against each other for the same house. It would be sort of very gentlemanly and sort of, 'After you' and 'After you'":

https://apnews.com/article/stephen-king-government-and-politics-b3ab31d8d8369e7feed7ce454153a03c

Penguin Random House didn't become the largest publisher in history by publishing better books or doing better marketing. They attained their scale by buying out their rivals. The company is actually a kind of colony organism made up of dozens of once-independent publishers. Every one of those acquisitions reduced the bargaining power of writers, even writers who don't write for PRH, because the disappearance of a credible bidder for our work into the PRH corporate portfolio reduces the potential bidders for our work no matter who we're selling it to.

I predict that PRH will not allow its writers to add a clause to their contracts forbidding PRH from using their work to train an AI. That prediction is based on my direct experience with two of the other Big Five publishers, where I know for a fact that they point-blank refused to do this, and told the writer that any insistence on including this contract would lead to the offer being rescinded.

The Big Five have remarkably similar contracting terms. Or rather, unremarkably similar contracts, since concentrated industries tend to converge in their operational behavior. The Big Five are similar enough that it's generally understood that a writer who sues one of the Big Five publishers will likely find themselves blackballed at the rest.

My own agent gave me this advice when one of the Big Five stole more than $10,000 from me – canceled a project that I was part of because another person involved with it pulled out, and then took five figures out of the killfee specified in my contract, just because they could. My agent told me that even though I would certainly win that lawsuit, it would come at the cost of my career, since it would put me in bad odor with all of the Big Five.

The writers who are cheering on Penguin Random House's new copyright notice are operating under the mistaken belief that this will make it less likely that our bosses will buy an AI in hopes of replacing us with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

That's not true. Giving Penguin Random House the right to demand license fees for AI training will do nothing to reduce the likelihood that Penguin Random House will choose to buy an AI in hopes of eroding our wages or firing us.

But something else will! The US Copyright Office has issued a series of rulings, upheld by the courts, asserting that nothing made by an AI can be copyrighted. By statute and international treaty, copyright is a right reserved for works of human creativity (that's why the "monkey selfie" can't be copyrighted):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

All other things being equal, entertainment companies would prefer to pay creative workers as little as possible (or nothing at all) for our work. But as strong as their preference for reducing payments to artists is, they are far more committed to being able to control who can copy, sell and distribute the works they release.

In other words, when confronted with a choice of "We don't have to pay artists anymore" and "Anyone can sell or give away our products and we won't get a dime from it," entertainment companies will pay artists all day long.

Remember that dope everyone laughed at because he scammed his way into winning an art contest with some AI slop then got angry because people were copying "his" picture? That guy's insistence that his slop should be entitled to copyright is far more dangerous than the original scam of pretending that he painted the slop in the first place:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/artist-appeals-copyright-denial-for-prize-winning-ai-generated-work/

If PRH was intervening in these Copyright Office AI copyrightability cases to say AI works can't be copyrighted, that would be an instance where we were on their side and they were on our side. The day they submit an amicus brief or rulemaking comment supporting no-copyright-for-AI, I'll sing their praises to the heavens.

But this change to PRH's copyright notice won't improve writers' bank-balances. Giving writers the ability to control AI training isn't going to stop PRH and other giant entertainment companies from training AIs with our work. They'll just say, "If you don't sign away the right to train an AI with your work, we won't publish you."

The biggest predictor of how much money an artist sees from the exploitation of their work isn't how many exclusive rights we have, it's how much bargaining power we have. When you bargain against five publishers, four studios or three labels, any new rights you get from Congress or the courts is simply transferred to them the next time you negotiate a contract.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism:

Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving your bullied schoolkid more lunch money. No matter how much you give them, the bullies will take it all. Give your kid enough lunch money and the bullies will be able to bribe the principle to look the other way. Keep giving that kid lunch money and the bullies will be able to launch a global appeal demanding more lunch money for hungry kids!

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

As creative workers' fortunes have declined through the neoliberal era of mergers and consolidation, we've allowed ourselves to be distracted with campaigns to get us more copyright, rather than more bargaining power.

There are copyright policies that get us more bargaining power. Banning AI works from getting copyright gives us more bargaining power. After all, just because AI can't do our job, it doesn't follow that AI salesmen can't convince our bosses to fire us and replace us with incompetent AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

Then there's "copyright termination." Under the 1976 Copyright Act, creative workers can take back the copyright to their works after 35 years, even if they sign a contract giving up the copyright for its full term:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Creative workers from George Clinton to Stephen King to Stan Lee have converted this right to money – unlike, say, longer terms of copyright, which are simply transferred to entertainment companies through non-negotiable contractual clauses. Rather than joining our publishers in fighting for longer terms of copyright, we could be demanding shorter terms for copyright termination, say, the right to take back a popular book or song or movie or illustration after 14 years (as was the case in the original US copyright system), and resell it for more money as a risk-free, proven success.

Until then, remember, just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side. They don't want to prevent AI slop from reducing your wages, they just want to make sure it's their AI slop puts you on the breadline.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/19/gander-sauce/#just-because-youre-on-their-side-it-doesnt-mean-theyre-on-your-side

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[sinfulpepsi]

The way I thought this was a screenshot from DBH is very telling

[andaniellight]

Ethan's absolute hatred and disgust towards AI that can mimic and duplicate human mannerism because the Entity tricked and almost lured him to his demise by using Benji's voice, someone he'd trust and trail after blindly to the end of the world

VS

Ethan having to stop every now and then as he goes on with his days because he's so used to being reminded by Luther about things he'd often forget, little things that'd slipped from his mind as his head injuries and age finally catch up with him, slowly realizing that perhaps one day, although he did promise that he'll continue living while dragging Benji along with him no matter what, now isn't so sure if he wants to actually live long enough to forget the sound of his old friends voice

[sugar-petals]

the problem with ai in kpop is that anything which takes off the inhumane average idol workload would be a good thing but if that thing mows down half the rainforest, steals, fools, dumbs us down, and drastically speeds up the comeback cycle (since you can pump out ai goop faster) so that idols end up working more anyway we are back to square one which is we gotta make even the most seductive ai content flop collectively for all it’s worth, and pressure companies to legally mark their products as such so we can avoid it.

i mean imagine. even if it rests him i don’t want to see lets say taemin copied to fake dance as “t-AI-min the carbon footprint criminal” in some elusive popup store wasting a gazillion gallons of water, and he doesn’t even get paid for lending his likeness. all training, fame, and skills in vain. i know it’s too late since companies use slop excessively now since it benefits only them and we consume it whether we want to or not but we can still refuse the obvious content. it just ruins fandoms, concert culture (!), the work of editors, fair salaries, privacy, and our perception of artistic excellence. 

in other words: in all possible lives i would choose yoongi rapping in person and not agust chatgpt ffs

[frettedzetaplushball]

[thedialoguedilemma]

Elon Musk alongside a group of investors want to buy OpenAI from Sam Altman for $97.4 billion dollars.

Sam Altman responded with "no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want"

This comes after Trump plans to invest $500 billion dollars to beef up AI capabilities in the United States in the ongoing fight with China making Sam Altman lead the charge

While Americans struggle with cost of living, groceries on the rise, and Elon invading through everyone’s personal information… two billionaires are battling it out for control of OpenAI with houses Chat GPT

[political-us]

[clonebrainrot]

Trump and Elon are trying to create a crypto currency reserve, but we all know they are trying to create the biggest pump and dump scheme in history.

One of these days the AI and crypto bubble will pop like its the year 2000 and it’s going to be devastating

[renthony]

I'm not worried about putting anti-AI distortion filters on my work, because people have been stealing my drawings and uploading them on "free clipart" sites for years. My writing gets screenshotted and posted on "meme" pages with no attribution (even though screenshots of original blog posts aren't "memes," oh my fucking god). My work is already being stolen. AI hasn't really changed anything for me on that front.

The horse is out of the stable and it's not going back in. I'm not worried about slapping a (dubiously effective) filter on every single piece of art I make as much as I'm worried about supporting entertainment industry unions as they fight for worker protections so that generative AI use doesn't fuck artists out of a job.

The mythologizing of AI has gotten out of hand. "AI" doesn't even have a set meaning. It's incredibly imprecise and creates a lot of needless confusion when the same term can mean "sorting algorithms for computer processes" and "programming for video game NPCs" and "brush stabilizing tools in digital art programs" and "program that generates images from prompts and a database of unethically-sourced media."

AI is being treated like a boogeyman with faerie rules by a lot of people who don't really have any idea how computers work or why it's actually a concern to working artists and their unions.

The actual problem is that generative AI can be used by companies to avoid paying human workers a living wage.

The problem is not that "computers have no soul and can't make real art!"

The actual solution is not "every artist do your part to defeat AI by using dubiously effective filters on literally everything you ever post online, ever," it's "unionize and fight for policies that protect creative professionals from exploitation."

Join a union. If you aren't eligible for something like SAG-AFTRA or the WGA (East or West) or TAG or IATSE or any number of other creative unions from around the world, you can join the IWW.

[ssnakey-b]

45 fires director of U.S. Copyright Office after she questioned the us of copyrighted material by AI companies

I feel like people REALLY need to know this and this is particularly relevant to what I do on this blog. As the title says, 45 has just fired the director of U.S. Copyright Office, transparently for having the audacity to raise concerns about the way AI corporations "use" (read: steal) copyrighted material.

To be clear, she didn't even truly oppose it, she wasn't making a big statement. She questioned it. And that was enough to incur the wrath of Billy Bob Hitler.

So yeah, next time some asshole tells you artists need to focus about more important things than genAI (while also telling artists to stop talking about politics so much), remember this.

AI, or at least the plagiarism algorithms corporations are calling AI, is directly tied to fascism, even when it isn't being used to actively profile people or carpet-bomb civilians. AI is a tool that both powers and is powere dby Human misery.

[colouredbyd]

AI in any field !!!

i haven’t talked about this yet because it still kind of stings, but i think it’s time i said something.

a few days ago, i participated in an MUN conference. i was the delegate of austria — something i took seriously, something i put so much effort into. the conference lasted from 8am to 6pm, and i showed up for every minute of it. i researched, wrote, prepared. when it came time to speak, i spoke like i meant it. because i did.

out of forty delegates, it came down to me and another boy, the delegate of spain. we debated for the last two hours while everyone else watched. and i mean this sincerely — he was amazing. we were both exhausted, but we kept going. i thought, no matter who wins, we earned this.

then it came time to submit our resolution papers. mine was over 7,000 words. i had written every single word myself. no shortcuts. no AI. just hours of reading, thinking, writing, refining — giving it everything.

but then the chairs announced that only papers that passed the AI detection checks would be considered for awards. and mine didn’t pass.

they didn’t pull me aside quietly. they didn’t ask if there had been a mistake. they announced it. out loud. in front of everyone. they said my paper was AI generated.

and it wasn’t.

and in that moment, it didn’t matter how much effort i had poured in. it didn’t matter how long i had researched or how well i had debated. it didn’t even matter that my voice had held up for ten straight hours in front of a room full of peers and mentors; because some algorithm—some faceless, soulless, fuckass machine—decided that my work didn’t sound “human enough.”

i cannot explain what it feels like to pour yourself into something and then be told — publicly — that it isn’t yours. that it couldn’t be.

and maybe they didn’t mean to humiliate me. maybe they were just doing their job. but i still had to sit there, in that room full of people, while everything i worked for was dismissed by a program that doesn’t know my voice. doesn’t know my effort. doesn’t know anything at all.

i didn’t stay for the ceremony. i couldn’t. i had my dad come pick me up early.

and i cried. not because i didn’t win but because i wasn’t believed. because my work, which i created with nothing but my hands, my brain, and my heart, was labeled a lie by a machine that has never written a thing worth crying over.

and i’m not angry at the boy who won. bless his heart—he got my number and actually called me to tell me i did amazing. and i believe him. he meant it. i’m not angry at the chairs either. they were just following the rules they were given.

but i am angry.

i’m angry at what this world is becoming. angry that we’ve let things get to the point where we have to prove we’re real.

angry that the people who use AI to cut corners, to plagiarize, to cheat—those people made it harder for those of us who actually care. who still believe in the slow work. the honest work. the work that makes your bones ache and your eyes blur from how long you’ve stared at the page.

i was accused of using a machine. but the accuser was a machine too.

and that, to me, is terrifying. it’s terrifying that we’re letting something this mechanical, this blind, decide who gets to be believed. who gets to be heard. who gets to be proud of the work they’ve done.

i’m still proud. because i know what i wrote. i know how hard i worked. i know what i gave. but it hurts. it really, really hurts to not be believed.

i think what hurts most is knowing this is only the beginning. that students and writers and artists are already being treated like suspects in the one place they’re supposed to be seen.

so let it be known: i was not silent. i was erased. and i will not forget that.

[why-ai]

[skull-pun]

I just...

I just don't know anymore.

[alyfoxxxen]

RFK Jr.'s "MAHA" report contained nonexistent studies. White House says it will be updated. - CBS News

[tmblrviralvideos]

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