“At issue is a new effort by the US Copyright Office to consider how to apply US copyright law to the nascent AI industry. The matter has triggered impassioned pushback from powerful tech interests who say they must have access to people’s hard work for free, or the future of their industry will be jeopardized.

The fight comes as artists, actors, news organizations, and others have sued AI companies using their work to train the emergent technology on how to create images in the style of certain artists, replicate voices of singers, write new literature based on copyrighted works, and many other instances in which original work is being harvested off the internet free of charge.”

The above passages come from a recent article in Jacobin titled, Big Tech Is Lobbying Hard to Keep Copyright Law Favorable to AI, written by Freddy Brewster. The issue of applying copyright law to the AI industry certainly is a fascinating and important topic to follow, but when I think about this AI stuff it brings up, for me, at lest two other issues that don’t come up in the media much which sooner or later might need to be reconciled with:

1. To be a broken record on this blog, artists and authors, as Roland Barthes teaches us, are not individual brilliant geniuses or gods; they are closer to craftspeople or scribes highly skilled at using a particular linguistic and/or visual code, and AI tools are simply exposing this. The invention of the printing press, as Marshal McLuhan reminds us, did away with the anonymity of the Medieval scholar who rarely signed what was nearly their own, and instead fostered ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. Intellectual effort, under the rules of extractive capitalism, has been imagined as an individual effort for private gain rather than a collective effort for the common good and this is not acceptable.

2. If AI tools allow anyone to become one of these highly skilled scribes or craftspeople then maybe some things that will change about “good” art and “ugly” art are things that won’t change at all: the purpose and process behind each piece created. In other words, great art, AI generated or not, will still be art that embodies a hoped for state, something that helps shift perspectives by fostering a multiplicity of interpretations leading to an increased capacity for radical and relational transformation in the viewer/reader/user. Second, those who know, know how much one’s process affects the quality of one’s art, and as Gregory Bateson reminds us, whether it’s AI generated or not art will remain form secreted from it. AI tools allow users to skip some parts of the creative/artistic process but the process (which perhaps includes things like one’s heritage, ecology, upbringing etc., but also includes the creative THOUGHT process) affects one’s art a great deal, and I would think that thoughtless bad art will still be thoughtless bad art (AI generated or not) and easily identifiable, there just might be a lot more of it because of how many potential scribes and craftspeople AI tools could help create.

Considering these two issues it becomes more clear that the artists, authors, actors, musicians and the others, that Brewster references in the article, are unfortunately fighting a battle that shouldn’t need to happen. Ideally, we wouldn’t be living under a suicidal political-economic system that pits citizens against each other in a competitive battle for private gain. Then AI tools could be free and open for anyone to use, and the poor artists and authors would no longer need to burden themselves with originality and copyright. AI has certainly let the cat out of bag, though, and fortunately (or unfortunately for some I’m sure) visual artists, actors, musicians, and writers will eventually have to admit that they’re not sovereign gods who create ex nihilo, as if in a vacuum. Like an AI program scraping everything it can find on the web to train itself, artists access everything at their disposal to secrete their art. “If you have read Jane Austen and James Joyce,” Steven Nachmanovitch declares, “they are inside you; if you listen to music, influences from diverse cultures are inside you, digested and assimilated into the integrated complex that is you. Even the music you hate sticks with you…Likewise with stories, images films…This is why there is no reason to be concerned with originality.”

But take heed you lowly scribes and craftspeople, as Nachmanovitch also reminds us, “Attempts at originality will set you drifting off course, while attempts to listen, connect, and respond will reflect your original nature in its ecology of relationship.”

…

Art above by Julien Simshäuser

Tags:anarchismArtificial IntelligenceComputer SciencecopyrightecologyeconomicsGregory BatesonLaw Roland BarthesMarshal McLuhanphilosophysocialismSteven Nachmanovitch