Disney sues Midjourney


log in or register to remove this ad

Well, it rehashes prior works to give what it has been trained is associated with what you input. Whether that resutl is actually "what you asked for" is another question, especially when those who actually own the AIs get to skew the models to give the results they want.

You're assuming your conclusion. Without IP law nobody owns the AIs.

I will never get over the irony of the generation of limewire now caring about copyright and paying artist.
The hypocrisy is indeed unfortunate

I personally would like to go back to 28 years of copyright but not only blowing up 8% of the economy out of spite but also disincentivizing future creative work is pretty extreme

This I can work with. I suppose that reverting it to its original length and scope would be acceptable to me. Although I don't know if I could trust it not to get out of control again. A limited length of about 20 years works fine for patents so it could work fine for copyright. However I still maintain that our current copyright system is worse than nothing.

(As for percentage of the economy, fossil fuels are a big portion of the world economy, but would any of you shed a tear for it if they finally got fusion power to work?)

You ignore the power of "and" - the work that a handful of people love AND that everyone else on Earth agrees is okay, AND that some people find horrible...

If someone said that if there was NO financial motive for art, there would be no art, you'd tell them they were being silly - some people will make art without any financial motive. And you'd be correct.

But you seem to be saying that as soon as one gets any recompense for art, all their art becomes of no value, made for the lowest common denominator - and that's just as silly, for exactly the same reason. Ergo, financial motives are not a death knell for art, in general.

For our purposes, financial support from art increases the opportunities to create art. If artistic creation means the artist doesn't have to spend their days sorting recycling, that means they can make more art! And, until we are in a post-scarcity world, the way to keep the artist from sorting bottles and cans is to pay them for their art.

Ok, I can agree that there is a middle ground. And that financial incentives can encourage the creation of art. However I still don't believe that the extra art resulting from that incentive is necessary to meet the public's contnet needs, and that it may make content less available overall, not just from the fact of having a pricetag but also due to the necessity of picking it out from all the shovelware that wouldn't exist without that incentive. People can make good contnet due to a financial incentive, but at least as many will make shovelware that buries it.

And, until we are in a post-scarcity world, the way to keep the artist from sorting bottles and cans is to pay them for their art.

We won't ever be living in a post-scarcity world if it has to come all at once. Coming bit-by-bit though I think it could happen by the turn of the century.
 
Last edited:

I will never get over the irony of the generation of limewire now caring about copyright and paying artist. (Yes I'm aware folks grow up and become the old people they made fun of)
I still mostly believe the same things as I did back then, but my priorities have shifted. And I think I might already be pushing the limit on politics here, so I'll leave it at that.
 

Personally I like to lump Marx together with his supposed opposites. Whether it's an obsession with workers or an obsession with corporate profits it's still an obsession with the supply side of the economy, and the conceit that the supply side of the econony has value independent of the demand side. Personally I believe that the consumer is the be-all and end-all of the economy.

EDIT:
I dream of a world where everything is so dirt cheap that it doesn't matter whether you have money. It's happened with various things or types of things before. It happened with sugar, it happened with aluminum, those used to be luxury substances and now even poor people can afford to drink large amounts of Coca-Cola* and I think that's beautiful. I want everything to be like that★★

*(albeit slightly less so now because of greedflation and shrinkflation)
★★And going back to the original point, AI is currently doing that with bespoke images, which previously cost like 50 dollars a pop★★★, but from the AI cost mere cents
★★★Although potentially as low as ten if you searched around for someone really cheap, but that's still more than I can afford to do regularly on my meager salary. After taxes and deductions I only take home like 350 dollars a week and most of that has to go towards gas, groceries, and other expenses.
Now dream of a world where you work full time but get paid nothing, because everyone else wants the fruits of your labor to be so dirt cheap, anyone can afford them. That's the world you're asking professional artists who rely on copyright protections to live in, so presumably, you're okay giving up your entire income, as well.

To which one might respond, "Sure, I'll give up my income in a post-scarcity economy." But, of course, we don't live in a post-scarcity economy. So it seems rather premature to suggest professional artists should be required to exist in some hypothetical future economy whose benefits they can't actually realize in the here and now.
 

Now dream of a world where you work full time but get paid nothing, because everyone else wants the fruits of your labor to be so dirt cheap, anyone can afford them. That's the world you're asking professional artists who rely on copyright protections to live in, so presumably, you're okay giving up your entire income, as well.
My job is crap. Both of my jobs. If I get replaced by a machine I'll find another crap job

Frankly I'm astonished that my main job hasn't been replaced by a robot already, because for seven years my main duty was to retrieve bottles from alphanumerically coded shelves, and that's exactly the same thing that the vending machines in the break room do.
 
Last edited:

My job is crap. Both of my jobs. If I get replaced by a machine I'll find another crap job
Sorry to hear that. I've definitely been there before, and may be there again soon.

That's why I dream of a world where everyone can make a living working in a career they find personally rewarding. I'd rather live in that world than a world where machines provide a bunch of free stuff to out-of-work humans.
 

why-would-i-dream-of-labor-v0-zj5gswulsqfc1.jpeg
 



Society is built on and by labor.

And copyright ensures that those who labor are fairly compensated when people want to use what they've created.

If you want to use somebody's intellectual property then you should pay for it.

AI companies instead chose to steal it and then use it to make money for themselves.
so you sit and dream of doing a JOB all day and all your life, and not a hobby or something you love doing?
 

Remove ads

Top