"Artist's Permission" (Art by Smooth Dunk)

Its so funny seeing the cope from tech enthusiasts. They'll claim copywrite is the devil and AI is good, actually, because it will erase legal ownership of art... because Microsoft and OpenAI and Elon Musk are totally gonna give up everything they make with AI for public use

Copyrighting is one of the few forms of IP I support. It’s highly specific and genuinely protects creators.
Patents, on the other hand, need to be destroyed.
And speaking as a tech enthusiast (and if you are on the fediverse right now I’d argue that also applies to you) GenAI has few valid use cases, and almost no valid use-cases under capitalism. I’d argue Meta’s plan to detect NSFL content qualifies, but that’s just old fashioned ML, not GenAI… so my point stands.
- I don't see how you can separate them. They both protect ideas, copyright protects creative ones and patents protect engineering ones. And with copyright there have been cases where I would say they weren't highly specific or genuinely protecting creators. Look at Katy Perry's 'Dark Horse' vs Flame's 'Joyful Noise' or Robin Thicke's 'Blurred Lines' vs Marvin Gaye's 'Got to Give it Up' or Men At Work's 'Down Under' vs bloody 'Kookaburra' for crying out loud. If any of those cases have any merit then you might as well be able to own entire genres, chords or scales.
  Copyright is an absolute cancer on society. Even if you ignore all the transformative works that get lumped in, like fanfiction or memes, you have genuine fair use like comment and critique getting taken down or demonetised because DMCA safe harbour laws mean websites have to be very capricious to protect themselves.
  The solution to the AI problem isn't to all of a sudden become pro-copyright again and I can't believe I have to say this out loud.
Microsoft, OpenAi, Musk and Google are the only ones that can afford the data. The data is essentially owned by aggregator websites (reddit, instagram, getty, etc), three publishing houses and five record companies.
If draconian laws are passed, the average artists will get nothing, the open source scene gets destroyed and a handful of companies get to monopolize the whole thing.
The copyright industry is not our friend and neither are the 4 stock tickers trying to make the tech illegal for everyone but them.
Copyright is pretty terrible, and I don’t think we should expand the power of copyright in order to get a handle on AI.
The good news is, we have other tools.
Gen AI firms are deliberately using creators’ own content to compete in the same space; that’s anti-competitive, hit em with antitrust
Nobody should be forced to accept an AI training provision in their contract; hit em with unions
If you identify a private detail of a person through large-scale statistics, that’s an invasion of privacy
Deepfaking someone is a violation of likeness rights and privacy; for sexual content, it should be a sexual offense as well
AI slop is polluting our communication channels while the devs say they bear no responsibility for it; we should treat info pollution as seriously as we (should) treat environmental pollution
Content provenance is also a good idea, though I don’t like the centralized nature of C2PA.
We have plenty of options for regulating here. They want you to think copyright is the only path, because they win either way there.

Realistically I think blue guy and 99% of humanity wouldn't / don't see how awful AI slob looks. 😿

Asking the bank for money would ruin the whole burgling industry which generates around a half a billion dollars annually.

What kills me about these arguments is that AI isn't even profitable. It's eye-catching for investors, but it costs more to run than people are willing to pay for it.

This has always been a fairly weak argument to me. Like the vast majority of the time when you publish content online you're either publishing it under a creative commons licence or something similar, which specifically allows other people to use your works however they like and/or the terms of website your posting it on allow them to do what they want with your content which includes training AI on it or selling it for that purpose.

There's plenty of very good arguments against AI (More so companies using AI for social manipulation or to maximise profits, rather than individuals using generative AI) but the whole "they didn't ask permission" angle is usually one of the weakest.

Of course there are some cases where people like published authors have had their works stolen for training data, but that's because those books are not published to social media nor licences that freely allow their manipulation and redistribution.

- ??? It's nit stealing though? If you upload something with a creative commons licence you are litterally giving anyone permission to use it however they want?
  It's like donating clothes to a charity shop then getting pissed off when they sell it to someone.
  Just because you don't understand how a charity shop works, doesn't mean the shop is """stealing""" from you.