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I don't think there's consensus around that idea. Lots of people (myself included) feel that copyright is already vastly overreaching, and that AI represents fo

• hnbad 2y ago
  Copyright is a logical consequence of property rights. I'd agree that property rights hold back industry and trade but if you want to abolish property rights, you first have to decommodify the essentials like food, housing, public infrastructure and healthcare, because unleashing the market when it has control over all of these is going to have some very undesirable consequences.
  • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    Copyright isn't a property right. Property rights are rivalrous. If you own a sandwich and a thousand other people want to eat your sandwich, only one person can, so property rights exist to define who gets to choose who gets to eat the sandwich. Writings and discoveries are non-rivalrous. To quote the first head of the US Patent Office: > He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. The term "intellectual property" is an attempt to conflate these things, to justify net-destructive money grabs like retroactive copyright term extensions, because traditional property rights don't expire but copyrights explicitly and intentionally do.
    • immibis 2y ago
      The definition of capitalism is a system in which all sorts of things that are not property are artificially made into property and given artificial property rights which can be traded.
      • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        That is the definition of capitalism people use when they want to apply the term capitalism to something that sucks. Allowing people to own physical items as business inventory or production equipment and compete with each other for the customer's dollar is entirely possible without the existence of copyright or patents. You would then be relying on some combination of open source, charitable contributions and patronage, industry joint ventures, personal itch scratching, etc. to create writings and inventions, but books and the wheel were created before patents and copyrights were.
        • fc417fc802 2y ago
          > You would then be relying on ... More likely trade secrets, NDAs, non-competes, and increasingly invasive DRM. In addition to the direct financial incentive, part of the logic behind IP law is to foster a more open market because that should be to the benefit of society at large in multiple ways. Patents, for example, ensure that at least some minimal description of the process gets published for others to take inspiration from.
          • AnthonyMouse 2y ago
            > More likely trade secrets, NDAs, non-competes, and increasingly invasive DRM. These are all also creatures of the law. If there was no copyright there would be no Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In many cases they can't work, e.g. because of the analog hole or because the mechanism of operation is observable to anyone who buys the product. The incentives to uncover those things are also much stronger in modern day because of the connectedness of the world. If there were two wheelwrights in your town and one of them had a secret process, no one but the other would have any use for it and if they found out they wouldn't even have any else to tell it to. If someone had a secret video encoding strategy today, some hobbyists would reverse engineer it and post it on the internet. > Patents, for example, ensure that at least some minimal description of the process gets published for others to take inspiration from. Have you read a modern patent? They're inscrutable, and to the fullest extent allowable attempt to claim the overall concept of doing something rather than describing a specific implementation.
• DeathArrow 2y ago
  >Its also not clear for example that Studio Ghibli lost by having their art style plastered all over the internet. Maybe Studio Ghibli is much more than merely a style. Maybe people aren't looking at their production just for the style. Most people dislike wearing fake clothes and the dislike wearing fake watches or fake jewelry. Because it isn't just about the style.
  • pixl97 2y ago
    >Most people dislike wearing fake clothes and the dislike wearing fake watches or fake jewelry I'd disagree. Most people don't like buying something 'real' then finding out it's fake. Far more people don't mind an actual fake if it's either high quality or is very low priced.
    • thot_experiment 2y ago
      Yeah ngl I have some fake designer stuff I got as a gift and I love it, and I especially love that it's fake. It feel like I'm pulling one over on the tryhards that care about that stuff being real, but I still get to enjoy the wild LV coat I have and ain't nobody checking the stitching on the lining to make sure it's the real thing. I could see myself buying more fakes in the future, but I'd never ever buy the real thing.
• wavemode 2y ago
  Companies like Studio Ghibli are not being harmed by AI, small freelance artists are.
  • masswerk 2y ago
    I think, Studio Ghibli will be affected, as well, since their "trademark style" (as we used to say), formerly a welcome sight and indicative for a certain type of story telling, will be devaluated as an indicator for slop. (Much like there are certain traits of an image, which we associate with soap operas and assume to be indicative of a low-value production.)
    • butlike 2y ago
      I doubt that. "Which movie does the slop belong to?" "Oh none of them? Ok" Is a pretty easy search term
      • masswerk 2y ago
        I doubt that, when confronted with an image that you've learned to associate with a plethora of low-quality / low-effort productions, you'd search for the possible origin, in the first place. (After all, it's yet another ephemeral image in "that AI style", with no apparent thought having gone into it, just some name dropping, at best. Or some generated, senseless story, you would be glad, the algorithm hadn't pointed your kids at. Why should you?)
• kelseyfrog 2y ago
  I'd take it farther to say that copyright and intellectual property is a legal fiction that ultimately benefits the wealthy[those who can pay to legally enforce it] over small artists. Small artists get paid to create the art; corporations benefit from exclusivity.
  • jayd16 2y ago
    The alternative being small artists don't get paid and corporations benefit from non-exclusivity.
    • kelseyfrog 2y ago
      Small artists operate in a service-based economy, not a mass-production one. The value lies in their unique perspective, process, and personal connection, not just in the final product. You hire them, not just pay for 'art'. What they're selling lies outside of the fiction of intellectual property.
• thwarted 2y ago
  > Its also not clear for example that Studio Ghibli lost by having their art style plastered all over the internet. I went home and watched a Ghibli film that week, as I'm sure many others did as well. Their revenue is probably up quite a bit right now? This sounds like a rewording of "You won't get paid, but this is a great opportunity for you because you'll get exposure".
  • Taek 2y ago
    Exposure has value! The meme around trying to pay artists with exposure is because some people think their "exposure" has meaningful value when they are offering to expose the artist to 100 people, 99 of whom aren't likely even target customers. Studio Ghibli on the other hand had exposure to millions of people (maybe hundreds of millions), and probably >5% of those were potential customers. So yes, being paid in exposure makes sense, if the exposure is actually worth what the art is worth. But most people offering to pay in exposure are overvaluing their exposure by 100x or more.
    • thwarted 2y ago
      > Studio Ghibli on the other hand had exposure to millions of people (maybe hundreds of millions), and probably >5% of those were potential customers. There's a lot of ifs in here. The number of people exposed to has an estimate that covers two orders of magnitude, "maybe". "probably". "greater than". "potential". In order for this exposure to have more value than the ownership of the original, all of those things need to fall into place. And no one can offer meaningful exposure based on the off-chance that a meme goes viral. All the risk is on the creator, they lose control of their asset and receive a lottery ticket in return. > So yes, being paid in exposure makes sense, if the exposure is actually worth what the art is worth. But most people offering to pay in exposure are overvaluing their exposure by 100x or more. Yes, but that's a big "but"; it's difficult to know the value of the "exposure" that is being offered, not to mention if the entity offering it is legit or if it's just a scam because they don't want to pay. Additionally, the AI companies who are slurping up copyrighted works to train their models are not offering exposure. And the mememaker who happens go viral can't offer it either.
  • 2y ago
• __loam 2y ago
  Nearly every artist I've spoken to or have seen talk about this technology says it's evil, so at least among the victims of this corporate abuse of the creative community, there's wide consensus that it's bad. > but I certainly don't think that AI without restrictions is going to lead to fewer people with art jobs. It's great that you think that but in reality a lot of artists are saying they're getting less work these days. Maybe that's the result of a shitty economy but I find it very difficult to believe this technology isn't actively stealing work from people.
  • Ray20 2y ago
    >in reality a lot of artists are saying they're getting less work these days Good. That means we as a society get more art cheaper. I've long since grown tired of sponsoring greed of artists.
    • mitthrowaway2 2y ago
      We'll get more art from AI, but less from humans.
      • __loam 2y ago
        Yeah that fuckin sucks.
• mycall 2y ago
  > "How can we monetize art" remains an open question for society Yet much of the best art imho is in the wild to the element while being at home at some random place. Or perhaps in someone's collection forgot and displaced. Art's worth will always be an open question.
• mrdependable 2y ago
  Studio Ghibli might not have been affected yet, but only because the technology is not there yet. What's going to happen when someone can make a competing movie in their style with just a prompt? Should we all just be okay with it because it's been decided that Studio Ghibli has made enough money? If the effort required to create that can just be ingested by a machine and replicated without consequence, how would it be viable for someone to justify that kind of investment? Where would the next evolution of the art form come from? Even if some company put in the time to create something amazing using AI that does require an investment, the precedent is that it can just be ingested and copied without consequence. I think aside from what is legal, we need to think about what kind of world we want to live in. We can already plainly see what social media has done to the world. What do you honestly think the world will look like once this plays out?
  • drdaeman 2y ago
    > What's going to happen when someone can make a competing movie in their style with just a prompt? Nothing? Just like how if some studio today invests millions of man-hours and does a competing movie in Studio Ghibli's aesthetic (but not including any Studio Ghibli's characters, branding, etc. - basically, not the copyrightable or trademarkable stuff) nothing out of ordinary is going to happen. I mean, artistic style is not copyrightable, right?
    • mrdependable 2y ago
      You are missing the point entirely. If you can make a movie with just a prompt, who is going to invest the money creating something like a Ghibli movie just to have it ripped off? Instead people will just rip off what has already been done and everything just stagnates.
      • Taek 2y ago
        How is "movies and other great works of art that used to cost tens of millions of dollars to make now cost tens of dollars to make" a bad thing? It means art can get more ambitious. Ghibli made their mark, and made their money. Now it's time for the next generation to have a turn.
• adamredwoods 2y ago
  The Ghibli style took humans decades to refine and create. All that respect and adoration for the craft and artists and the time it took, is now gone in an instant, making it a shallow trivial thing. Worse is to have another company exploit it with no regard for the ones who helped make it a reality. The threat of AI produced art will forever trivialise human artistic capabilities. The reality is: why bother when it can be done faster and cheaper? The next generation will leverage it, and those skills will be very rare. It is the nature of technology to do this.