5 ms·

> without cutting in the existing rights holders properly. That's the killer, right there. "existing rights holders" is a big deal, and one that has been igno

> without cutting in the existing rights holders properly. That's the killer, right there. "existing rights holders" is a big deal, and one that has been ignored by tech bros for a long time. As a [former] artist, and [former] musician, I can say that the tech industry has been cooking the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs. The opportunity for individual financial and ego success is a huge driver for modern popular art culture (for better and for worse). If we take that away, guess what happens? No one wants to do it, anymore. This may be an issue, with AI-generated creative content. Unless the AI is truly better than human talent (and "better" is in the eye of the beholder), it has the very real prospect of turning the commercial creative industry into gray goo. [EDITED TO ADD] Watching the karma count on this post, yo-yoing up and down, has been fascinating. This seems to be an issue that people have very strong feelings about.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago
Destroying commercial art culture really might not be a bad thing. The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art, and would continue doing it even if the big corporate parasites went bankrupt.
- earthnail 2y ago
  I believe the implications are a bit different. It takes a lot of time to learn to make music. If you can’t make it as a famous artists (the odds of which are about as high as becoming a football star), you previously still had the option to use your music skills to make money with boring work: music for ads for example. That’s going away. Now it’s becoming a lot more like professional sports: either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market. It increases the risk significantly and will lead to less people pursuing a musician career. I hope that my explanation is not perceived as judging in any way, but purely as an explanation.
  - CaptWillard 2y ago
    "either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market" I think uncommon focus, discipline, physical and mental dexterity along with the ability to perform under pressure are being undervalued here.
    - throwway_278314 2y ago
      I've been out of work for close to 6 months now, actively searching, interviewing every week, and finding that what the job market seems to value is that you have done the exact same thing as what they are hiring for. I've discovered breakthrough algos and delivered solutions which personalize medical care, sometimes with life and death outcomes. Yet somehow that doesn't count when the company wants someone who has done personalization for consumer products. I have other examples from other common DS roles/tasks, where I have done the equivalent thing to that role in a different context. And somehow that never seems to count. So no, I don't have strong evidence that the job market values generic skills. Perhaps your experience has been different? I can also hear someone saying "with the attitude that the poster is taking, I'm not surprised"-- so let me point out how difficult it is to extract attitude from text, and that the context here (presenting evidence to refute a claim) is very different from an interview context.
  - underlipton 2y ago
    It'd seem to me that a society that values art would find a way to keep artists secure economically while letting as many people as possible enjoy their work. I tend to think of piracy as a scapegoat for the draining of the working and middle class's purchasing power. Napster and Spotify came along as people were beginning to find it prohibitively expensive to drop $20 on an album. People would pay if they could (some do, if vinyl sales are anything to go by).
  - butlike 2y ago
    For. The. Love. Of. The. Game. Your skills are cause you wanted to do it, not because you wanted to be famous. That's the by-product.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  > The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art I wouldn't be so sure about that. The overwhelming majority don't make big money, but many, many creatives make a living on their art, and a lot of them are OK with being fairly low-paid (I know quite a few). They do what they love, and get paid enough to keep doing it. As a musician friend of mine says "You know what's great? I get to play music for people, and then they pay me for it, when I'm done!". He is not a huge rock star, but does well enough to tour around the country. People tend to sneer at creatives, thinking of them as "parasites," or "doing something that anyone can do, so why should they be paid?" I can tell you that I appreciate having a trained professional designer, help me with my software design. They can do something like fart out a logo in five minutes, that can become one of the most significant assets a company has. That's a really valuable skill. We'll have to see if AI can actually replace that. It probably will, for many contexts. It's gotta be better than some of the efforts I see, by engineers that think they are creative, but aren't.
  - account42 2y ago
    > "You know what's great? I get to play music for people, and then they pay me for it, when I'm done!" This transaction does not need IP protection at all.
  - whycome 2y ago
    How would his career change if AI music become prevalent? He could still play for crowds and get paid. Does he ever play covers? He benefits from the work of others too. He might one day play covers of some hit AI tunes.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    There are way more people that draw, paint, sing, or play an instrument for their own and their friends enjoyment than any who make a living at it. Not sure how you could think that’s not true.
bobajeff 2y ago
>The opportunity for individual financial and ego success is a huge driver for modern popular art culture (for better and for worse). If we take that away, guess what happens? No one wants to do it, anymore. I don't know about financial success but I think losing ego building as artist incentives might not be a bad thing. Maybe it's an unhealthy focus and probably shouldn't be supported. Intuitively, I think those kind of drives will not go away no matter what support you give it. However, I can't believe that feeding that beast is not having an effect.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  The ego stuff can be sickening, but it is definitely a draw. Some of the best musicians and artists, ever, have been rather appalling personalities. I won't go into naming names.
  - butlike 2y ago
    If you get used to stepping on the shoulders of others, that cascades to other aspects of your life and sooner-or-later a paparazzi video comes out of you being a dick to wait staff or worse.
- butlike 2y ago
  Being "the guy" is the moat in entertainment. The problem is if you remove that, then the throngs of folks can make content to where it becomes "if everyone's special, no one is." I get it, I just wish it wasn't the case.
chaostheory 2y ago
The music industry isn’t a “goose that lays golden eggs” for the greater economy. It’s not as democratic or accessible as the tech industry either. You’d have a stronger argument if it was at least fair to the artists that it purportedly represents. It’s not.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  The music industry has been the one making the pots and pans. But it is also the one that has been making it possible for creatives to become obscenely rich. It's actually only fairly recently, in history, that creatives could become independently successful, without having patrons. I don't know of anyone that has become rich, using Patreon (I could be wrong, though, as it has never really been something that I've paid attention to). Not sure if the patronage model works for creatives. It's fascinating to see folks in tech, who are obsessed with becoming rich robber barons, get upset at the prospect of other people getting rich, doing non-tech stuff.
  - fluoridation 2y ago
    A few people becoming obscenely rich is not a good in itself. That is to say, it's not a reason that justifies the music industry existing as it does today. That would be like arguing that it's good (just in general) that smoking is banned because I specifically don't like smoking. A good reason could be that it causes more music to be made, or better music, or it lets more people make music. I honestly have no idea if that's true. Certainly the last one isn't; what lets more people make music is access to technology, not the possibility of getting rich.
  - chaostheory 2y ago
    This isn’t a good argument since extremely few creatives get obscenely rich and few creatives are even able to generate a decent income to do things like being able to buy a home. At least in tech, the pot is more evenly distributed and for more types of people. It even contributes to the broader economy as a whole with genuine innovation as opposed to just collecting rent on IP.
EasyMark 2y ago
No we just realized people who pirate likely aren’t going to buy it anyway, you can’t claim lost profits for ~$0.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  I wouldn't say that, myself. In the case of software (a creative product that many, here, have a vested interest in), pirating can actually lead to future sales. I think one of the most pirated programs out there, used to be Adobe Photoshop. This resulted in a huge number of folks that became expert Photoshop users, and that drove sales of the app, in their careers. The same probably cannot be said for games. I suspect a pirated game, is a lost sale.
  - butlike 2y ago
    Personal experience (sample size: 1), a lost sale when I was age 16 made a true believer out of me for some developers, so at 35 I buy their games no question day 1. A lot can change in 19 years, but I've gone back and bought most every game I pirated on steam now that the income isn't as scarce.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      For myself, I also pay for my creative consumer stuff (streaming and art). It's a bit dispiriting, to be sneered at, for it.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Who are these developers making reliably good games over 20 years? Lemmings was a great game, but that isn't informative as to Grand Theft Auto, which isn't.
      - dvlsg 2y ago
        FromSoft, potentially. Even if you only start counting years at Demon's Souls (2009), that still gets them to 15 years.
butlike 2y ago
I...I want to make ego-less music... ._.
kmeisthax 2y ago
You're mixing several valid criticisms of the tech industry with a really invalid critique of Free Culture[0]. If it were true that "taking away the opportunity for individual financial and ego success" meant nobody makes creative works anymore, then we wouldn't have Wikipedia, the SCP Foundation wiki, GNU, or Linux. I also want to point out that it was specifically the Free Software people who fired the first shot against generative AI, because a lot of our licenses are designed to resist enclosure of the commons. Yes, the tech industry is an interloper in an industry that has had long-standing sweetheart deals with governments both liberal, neoliberal[1], and otherwise. However, that industry - the creative industry - was not at all pro-artist beyond making sure artists had something worth stealing. The tech industry started out not understanding the creative industry's norms and laws, but has long since graduated into facilitating new versions of some of its worst abuses. We're not the same tech industry that gave the world Napster anymore. The whole reason why, e.g., Apple gets to charge a blatantly supra-competitive 30% on every purchase on iPhone comes down to copyright ownership over iOS. To wit: most of the biggest cheerleaders for generative AI are in the creative industry. You have CEOs ranting and raving about how once the plausible sentence generators are up to speed, they can fire entire classes of artists and workers. Videogame companies make voice actors audibly consent to voice cloning at the start of each recording session. The RIAA is not suing Udio to protect the role of musicians, they're suing so they can produce a "licensed" model that nicely cuts artists and bands out of their royalties. Yes, the people in the GenAI space have a "fast and loose" interpretation of copyright, but that's less "information wants to be free" and more "we'll ask for forgiveness and take a license once all this AI fairy dust pays out". Licensed GenAI is not going to be any better than the current state of affairs because the threat of GenAI is not the copying of any one individual work. Copyright is an individualistic system, and ownership is for owners, not workers. And even if you decide you'll never license your specific work to AI, someone else will, and the system will still work the same. As creative workers, the threat to you from GenAI is from collective obsolescence, a loss of social position and privilege, and decreases in your material standard of living due to the above. Copyright exists to perpetuate capitalism, and thus considers none of those consequences to be violations of the law. There is no copyright law that would, say, prohibit soundtracks in motion pictures so that live musicians could continue playing in theaters[2]. The law could require the specific artist who wrote and recorded that soundtrack to be paid, but that's only one person, getting a far larger windfall. Everyone else got screwed and the artistic landscape got just a bit more unequal. [0] as in, people who want copyright-free / freely-licensed cultural works and do so legitimately through consent [1] Fascism with extra steps [2] To be clear, GenAI is not like having a soundtrack in a movie, the analogy just happens to be illustrative of my point.

amanaplanacanal 2y ago

Destroying commercial art culture really might not be a bad thing. The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art, and would continue doing it even if the big corporate parasites went bankrupt.

earthnail 2y ago
I believe the implications are a bit different. It takes a lot of time to learn to make music. If you can’t make it as a famous artists (the odds of which are about as high as becoming a football star), you previously still had the option to use your music skills to make money with boring work: music for ads for example. That’s going away. Now it’s becoming a lot more like professional sports: either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market. It increases the risk significantly and will lead to less people pursuing a musician career. I hope that my explanation is not perceived as judging in any way, but purely as an explanation.
- CaptWillard 2y ago
  "either you make it, or your hard earned skills are useless on the job market" I think uncommon focus, discipline, physical and mental dexterity along with the ability to perform under pressure are being undervalued here.
  - throwway_278314 2y ago
    I've been out of work for close to 6 months now, actively searching, interviewing every week, and finding that what the job market seems to value is that you have done the exact same thing as what they are hiring for. I've discovered breakthrough algos and delivered solutions which personalize medical care, sometimes with life and death outcomes. Yet somehow that doesn't count when the company wants someone who has done personalization for consumer products. I have other examples from other common DS roles/tasks, where I have done the equivalent thing to that role in a different context. And somehow that never seems to count. So no, I don't have strong evidence that the job market values generic skills. Perhaps your experience has been different? I can also hear someone saying "with the attitude that the poster is taking, I'm not surprised"-- so let me point out how difficult it is to extract attitude from text, and that the context here (presenting evidence to refute a claim) is very different from an interview context.
- underlipton 2y ago
  It'd seem to me that a society that values art would find a way to keep artists secure economically while letting as many people as possible enjoy their work. I tend to think of piracy as a scapegoat for the draining of the working and middle class's purchasing power. Napster and Spotify came along as people were beginning to find it prohibitively expensive to drop $20 on an album. People would pay if they could (some do, if vinyl sales are anything to go by).
- butlike 2y ago
  For. The. Love. Of. The. Game. Your skills are cause you wanted to do it, not because you wanted to be famous. That's the by-product.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
> The overwhelming majority of visual artists, writers and musicians don’t make money from their art I wouldn't be so sure about that. The overwhelming majority don't make big money, but many, many creatives make a living on their art, and a lot of them are OK with being fairly low-paid (I know quite a few). They do what they love, and get paid enough to keep doing it. As a musician friend of mine says "You know what's great? I get to play music for people, and then they pay me for it, when I'm done!". He is not a huge rock star, but does well enough to tour around the country. People tend to sneer at creatives, thinking of them as "parasites," or "doing something that anyone can do, so why should they be paid?" I can tell you that I appreciate having a trained professional designer, help me with my software design. They can do something like fart out a logo in five minutes, that can become one of the most significant assets a company has. That's a really valuable skill. We'll have to see if AI can actually replace that. It probably will, for many contexts. It's gotta be better than some of the efforts I see, by engineers that think they are creative, but aren't.
- account42 2y ago
  > "You know what's great? I get to play music for people, and then they pay me for it, when I'm done!" This transaction does not need IP protection at all.
- whycome 2y ago
  How would his career change if AI music become prevalent? He could still play for crowds and get paid. Does he ever play covers? He benefits from the work of others too. He might one day play covers of some hit AI tunes.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- amanaplanacanal 2y ago
  There are way more people that draw, paint, sing, or play an instrument for their own and their friends enjoyment than any who make a living at it. Not sure how you could think that’s not true.

bobajeff 2y ago

>The opportunity for individual financial and ego success is a huge driver for modern popular art culture (for better and for worse). If we take that away, guess what happens? No one wants to do it, anymore. I don't know about financial success but I think losing ego building as artist incentives might not be a bad thing. Maybe it's an unhealthy focus and probably shouldn't be supported. Intuitively, I think those kind of drives will not go away no matter what support you give it. However, I can't believe that feeding that beast is not having an effect.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
The ego stuff can be sickening, but it is definitely a draw. Some of the best musicians and artists, ever, have been rather appalling personalities. I won't go into naming names.
- butlike 2y ago
  If you get used to stepping on the shoulders of others, that cascades to other aspects of your life and sooner-or-later a paparazzi video comes out of you being a dick to wait staff or worse.
butlike 2y ago
Being "the guy" is the moat in entertainment. The problem is if you remove that, then the throngs of folks can make content to where it becomes "if everyone's special, no one is." I get it, I just wish it wasn't the case.

chaostheory 2y ago

The music industry isn’t a “goose that lays golden eggs” for the greater economy. It’s not as democratic or accessible as the tech industry either. You’d have a stronger argument if it was at least fair to the artists that it purportedly represents. It’s not.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
The music industry has been the one making the pots and pans. But it is also the one that has been making it possible for creatives to become obscenely rich. It's actually only fairly recently, in history, that creatives could become independently successful, without having patrons. I don't know of anyone that has become rich, using Patreon (I could be wrong, though, as it has never really been something that I've paid attention to). Not sure if the patronage model works for creatives. It's fascinating to see folks in tech, who are obsessed with becoming rich robber barons, get upset at the prospect of other people getting rich, doing non-tech stuff.
- fluoridation 2y ago
  A few people becoming obscenely rich is not a good in itself. That is to say, it's not a reason that justifies the music industry existing as it does today. That would be like arguing that it's good (just in general) that smoking is banned because I specifically don't like smoking. A good reason could be that it causes more music to be made, or better music, or it lets more people make music. I honestly have no idea if that's true. Certainly the last one isn't; what lets more people make music is access to technology, not the possibility of getting rich.
- chaostheory 2y ago
  This isn’t a good argument since extremely few creatives get obscenely rich and few creatives are even able to generate a decent income to do things like being able to buy a home. At least in tech, the pot is more evenly distributed and for more types of people. It even contributes to the broader economy as a whole with genuine innovation as opposed to just collecting rent on IP.

EasyMark 2y ago

No we just realized people who pirate likely aren’t going to buy it anyway, you can’t claim lost profits for ~$0.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I wouldn't say that, myself. In the case of software (a creative product that many, here, have a vested interest in), pirating can actually lead to future sales. I think one of the most pirated programs out there, used to be Adobe Photoshop. This resulted in a huge number of folks that became expert Photoshop users, and that drove sales of the app, in their careers. The same probably cannot be said for games. I suspect a pirated game, is a lost sale.
- butlike 2y ago
  Personal experience (sample size: 1), a lost sale when I was age 16 made a true believer out of me for some developers, so at 35 I buy their games no question day 1. A lot can change in 19 years, but I've gone back and bought most every game I pirated on steam now that the income isn't as scarce.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    For myself, I also pay for my creative consumer stuff (streaming and art). It's a bit dispiriting, to be sneered at, for it.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Who are these developers making reliably good games over 20 years? Lemmings was a great game, but that isn't informative as to Grand Theft Auto, which isn't.
    - dvlsg 2y ago
      FromSoft, potentially. Even if you only start counting years at Demon's Souls (2009), that still gets them to 15 years.

butlike 2y ago

I...I want to make ego-less music... ._.

kmeisthax 2y ago

You're mixing several valid criticisms of the tech industry with a really invalid critique of Free Culture[0]. If it were true that "taking away the opportunity for individual financial and ego success" meant nobody makes creative works anymore, then we wouldn't have Wikipedia, the SCP Foundation wiki, GNU, or Linux. I also want to point out that it was specifically the Free Software people who fired the first shot against generative AI, because a lot of our licenses are designed to resist enclosure of the commons. Yes, the tech industry is an interloper in an industry that has had long-standing sweetheart deals with governments both liberal, neoliberal[1], and otherwise. However, that industry - the creative industry - was not at all pro-artist beyond making sure artists had something worth stealing. The tech industry started out not understanding the creative industry's norms and laws, but has long since graduated into facilitating new versions of some of its worst abuses. We're not the same tech industry that gave the world Napster anymore. The whole reason why, e.g., Apple gets to charge a blatantly supra-competitive 30% on every purchase on iPhone comes down to copyright ownership over iOS. To wit: most of the biggest cheerleaders for generative AI are in the creative industry. You have CEOs ranting and raving about how once the plausible sentence generators are up to speed, they can fire entire classes of artists and workers. Videogame companies make voice actors audibly consent to voice cloning at the start of each recording session. The RIAA is not suing Udio to protect the role of musicians, they're suing so they can produce a "licensed" model that nicely cuts artists and bands out of their royalties. Yes, the people in the GenAI space have a "fast and loose" interpretation of copyright, but that's less "information wants to be free" and more "we'll ask for forgiveness and take a license once all this AI fairy dust pays out". Licensed GenAI is not going to be any better than the current state of affairs because the threat of GenAI is not the copying of any one individual work. Copyright is an individualistic system, and ownership is for owners, not workers. And even if you decide you'll never license your specific work to AI, someone else will, and the system will still work the same. As creative workers, the threat to you from GenAI is from collective obsolescence, a loss of social position and privilege, and decreases in your material standard of living due to the above. Copyright exists to perpetuate capitalism, and thus considers none of those consequences to be violations of the law. There is no copyright law that would, say, prohibit soundtracks in motion pictures so that live musicians could continue playing in theaters[2]. The law could require the specific artist who wrote and recorded that soundtrack to be paid, but that's only one person, getting a far larger windfall. Everyone else got screwed and the artistic landscape got just a bit more unequal. [0] as in, people who want copyright-free / freely-licensed cultural works and do so legitimately through consent [1] Fascism with extra steps [2] To be clear, GenAI is not like having a soundtrack in a movie, the analogy just happens to be illustrative of my point.