But that’s specific to universities as institutions, not art as a concept. There are plenty of artists without formal education that got inspiration from the things we saw. We could have a discussion about how internet scrapers get their data, however that’s a different conversation. AI art isn’t stealing content, it’s using existing content (in albeit questionable ways) to generate new and unique content.

But that’s not what these generative AIs do. They use actual content for training, but all generations are unique… Just like actual art

When you start getting into the specifics, it becomes way more complicated. How exactly should these AI companies notify people that their content is being used for their model? First of all, they’re not actually the ones harvesting the data. That scrapers tend to be independent… so these artists are going after the wrong people, unless you expect the AI company to parse through all the data they use to find the rightful owners of everything and ask for their consent, which isn’t really viable, let alone practical. Let’s suppose the artists do go after the scrapers, how exactly do they notify people that their content is being used? The content is collected by an algorithm, how are they supposed to reliably identify the rightful owners of content and ask for their consent? Do they just send automatic messages to any email or phone number they find?

How about this, what if an artist is posting their art on a platform, like say for example Reddit, and that platform agrees to allow the data to scraped and used for AI data training? Does the platform company own the data on the platform or the individual artist? If it is the latter, what’s stopping platforms from modifying their TOS to just claim ownership of anything posted on their platforms? Again, what is the ultimate goal here?

The point is that while I agree that AI has to be regulated, the criticisms and proposed regulations have to specific and pragmatic for them to mean anything. This general hatred of AI and whining by artists and other groups is just noise. It’s just people trying to fight against technology, and as history has shown us before, they will inevitably lose. New technologies have always threatened and displaced well established workers, careers, and industries. For example, lamp lighting used to an actual job, but as the technology improved and light bulbs became a thing, lamplighters became a thing of the past. They tried very hard to resist the change and managed to do so for awhile, but it was a losing battle and they eventually faded away. Economics and technology always win.

That’s kind of the key here, these generative AI’s are the light bulbs of our era. They’ve already replaced a bunch of jobs and radically changing entire industries. There’s no ultimate goal with them and there’s no fighting them. Pandora’s box is open and it’s not going to close. This new technology is still at it’s infancy now, but it’s going to rapidly expand, evolve, and adapt to a bunch of different situations. Whle regulations can help guide this freight train of a technology in the right direction, they can’t stop something with no brakes. As it gets adopted by more and more people and used in more and more spaces, it’s going to alter how we do things kind of like how smartphones or social media did. We have no choice but to evolve with them or else we’ll become the new lamplighters.

The online scrapers just add whatever can be publicly viewed to their datasets. I fail to see how this is any different from actual artists going on the internet to view art to inspire and influence them. Regardless, what exactly do these artists demand? They can’t fight technology and win, this is a futile battle that has been fought and lost many times before. AI art isn’t going anywhere, it’s here to stay and it’ll only get better. No amount of anti-AI posts is going to change this. What exactly is the ultimate goal here?

That should be at the forefront of our political discourse. We had Andrew Yang bring make some noise back in 2019/2020, but he was the only one to bring AI, automation, and UBI and he kind of faded into irrelevancy. Which is unfortunate because nobody else is talking about any of these things, especially the dinosaurs we have running for president right now.

Andrew Yang should’ve been president

AI is on its way to automate most jobs. The economy is about radically change

AI doesn’t steal art. It creates new and unique images, it just uses existing art as inspiration… Like what real artist do.