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- cross-posted to:
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Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.
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I’ve been disappointed to see Doctrow’s reaction to the AI industry, to say the least. He’s spent so much time relentlessly campaigning against intellectual property that he apparently cannot imagine anything worse than intellectual property winning anything ever. I don’t think he’s a big picture guy, I think the internet just really likes him because at the end of the day he was popular on slashdot and he tells people that piracy is awesome.
Doctorow’s had some pretty bad takes, honestly, for all I agree with him on some things. His review of Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger – a book which explores conspiracy theories and how they capture people – reduces the entire book, incorrectly, to his own political soapbox:
Fundamentally: Klein is a leftist, Wolf was a liberal.
This is, frankly, juvenile. Not every bad thing in the world can be mapped on to one’s particular soapboxes. Treating GenAI as Good because Copyright is Bad is exactly in character for him.
(Also Cory gets smug about releasing his novels CC, as if all working writers can do that, but I’m sure it helps the family finances that his wife is an executive at Disney. It’s great to use money from one of copyright’s biggest monsters to act self-righteous about other people trying to make a living.)
his wife is an executive at Disney
Wait. What? Holy shit, every good goddamn thing he’s ever released regarding copyright and intellectual property needs a big bold disclaimer about that in front then.
Fucker’s talking out both sides of his mouth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Taylor_(businesswoman)
In 2017, Disney acquired Makie Labs technology and personnel for an undisclosed figure.
In keeping with the strategic acquisition, Ms Taylor is now the Director, StudioLab at The Walt Disney Studios. In that role she is responsible for ensuring that Disney continues to invest in the intersection between online tech and content distribution.
I’m sorry, in non-executive speak, doesn’t that heavily imply that she at least oversees some work on DRM? Any content distribution method Disney touches with a 40-foot pole is going to have DRM methodology.
Motherfucker.
so should he have divorced her in 2017 to prove his ideological purity?
(waves to the local chapter of the leftist circular firing squad)
To be clear, I was critiquing his smug intolerance to be people who don’t meet his standards of so-called leftist perfection, when he, himself, is as complex as anyone else. I was not critiquing his being married or his living under capitalism.
fwiw i was mostly annoyed by the “his wife is doing what” in the comment i was answering directly – going after him just because of his wife would be like going after varoufakis just because his wife is supposedly the heroine of blur’s “common people”.
and i happily agree that doctorow could dispense with his privilege, tone down the smugness and try for less shallow takes once in a while.
(if we were to question bonafides of leftist intellectuals[1] just because they are supported by someone belonging to the moneyed class, or come from the moneyed class themselves, we’d need to start with certain mr. marx, comrades. and numerous others.)
however you value doctorow’s qualities as an intellectual. ↩︎
One of my fav Marx anecdotes is no matter how tough economically the family had it, they never dispensed with the maid. Tbf maid wages were prolly really low, and the maid probably made Mrs Marx’ life easier, but I also don’t think Marx ever thought of the maid’s work as Labor.
Marx (who to be fair was operating in a very different global economy) explicitly excluded servants and other service labor from the proletariat, because he had an extremely industrial (cough gendered) definition of “productive labour.” That being said, he was friends, intellectual collaborators, and possibly lovers with the housekeeper.
Disclaimer: I am no marx historian; my knowledge of marxist theory tends toward literary analysis. I may be simplifying to the point of wrong.
Yeah, I think his ideological commitment to “all intellectual property rights are bad forever and always amen” kind of blinds him to the actual issue here, and his proposed solution is kind of nonsensical in terms of its ability to get off the ground.
More broadly, (ie not just in relation to Cory Doctorow), I’ve seen the take floating around that’s like “hey, what the heck, artists who were opposed to ridiculous IP rights restrictions when it was the music industry doing it are now in favor of those restrictions when it’s AI, what gives with this hypocrisy?” which I think kind of… misses the point?
A lot of artists generally are in favor of using their work for interesting collaborative stuff and aren’t going to get mad if you use their stuff for your own creative endeavors. This is why we have things like Creative Commons. The actual things artists tend not to like are things like having their work used for commercial purposes without permission and/or having their work taken without credit. (This is why CC licenses often restrict these usages!) With that in mind, a lot of the artist outrage over AI feels much more in line with artists getting mad about, say, watermark-removal tools, or people reposting art without credit, than it does with the copyright battles of the 00s. (You may remember one of the big things artists were affronted by about AI art was the way it would imitate an artist’s signature, because of what that represented.)
In this case, artists are leaning on copyright not out of any particular ideological commitment but just because it’s the blunt instrument that they already have at their disposal. But I think Cory Doctorow’s previous experience in “getting mad at the MPAA” or whatever kind of forces him to analyze this using the same framing as that issue, which doesn’t really make sense in this case. And ironically saying “copyright shouldn’t count for AI” aligns him with the position of the MPAA so it really does feel like a “live long enough to see yourself become the villain” scenario. :/
More broadly, (ie not just in relation to Cory Doctorow), I’ve seen the take floating around that’s like “hey, what the heck, artists who were opposed to ridiculous IP rights restrictions when it was the music industry doing it are now in favor of those restrictions when it’s AI, what gives with this hypocrisy?” which I think kind of… misses the point?
I’ve noticed that too, on occasion. I think the “hey whoa, artists are copyright maximalists now?!” takes tend to miss how artists are coming from concerns about what is morally right and how they can make a living, not copyright as a principle. The latter is, at most, a tool to achieve the former.
With that in mind, a lot of the artist outrage over AI feels much more in line with artists getting mad about, say, watermark-removal tools, or people reposting art without credit, than it does with the copyright battles of the 00s.
This says it better than I was going to.
I’m no lawyer, I don’t even play one on TV, so upfront apologies if I’m hanging my ass out.
That said, it sounds to me like Doctorow might have a point here. Suppose Universal et al. gets a precedent-setting ruling and slays OpenAI. LOL, LMAO even, but then what? What’s to keep the current entertainment cartels from making deals with Microsoft or the husks of the AI companies to rev up their own (now) fully legal and licensed bullshit engines? The only winning legal play is Giant Asteroid.
He says some pretty ignorant stuff in this post that undercuts his argument, though:
Here’s the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers. They don’t want to get rid of generative AI, they just want to get paid for the content used to create it. Their use-case for gen AI is the same as Openai’s CTO’s use-case: get rid of creative jobs and pay less for creative labor.
This isn’t hypothetical. Remember last summer’s actor strike? The sticking point was that the studios wanted to pay actors a single fee to scan their bodies and faces, and then use those scans instead of hiring those actors, forever, without ever paying them again. Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?
The writers’ and actors’ strikes, in an overwhelmingly unionized workforce, did not say “hey, we as a labor force want a cut of the dirty GPT lucre”. Instead, they said not today, satan to studios working with GenAI at all. And won. Those writers and actors, who are overwhelmingly huge supporters of copyright and moral rights, defeated the rich assholes at the Big Five not by throwing up their hands and giving all their creative output to the glurge machine, but by unionizing and painful, hard-won solidarity.
Whether SAG-AFTRA and the AFM (or non US equivalents) can organize as effectively for musicians and lyricists is unclear. But Cory, who claims to be a leftist, is defaulting to “you as a musician should work for free” and not “you as a musician should organize to counter the power of capital”, and that’s about as leftist as Grimes posing with The Communist Manifesto.
Cory, who claims to be a leftist
I read one of his books and I gotta tell ya, his idea of scifi was ‘what if the people negatively impacted by DRM were oppressed minorities instead of just first world complainers.’
Suppose Universal et al. gets a precedent-setting ruling and slays OpenAI. LOL, LMAO even, but then what? What’s to keep the current entertainment cartels from making deals with Microsoft or the husks of the AI companies to rev up their own (now) fully legal and licensed bullshit engines?
I think it remains to be seen if you can train a base model without something as big as common crawl. A precedent that Universal needs to give you permission could also be a precedent that everyone must give you permission for you to scrape them.
The point is that these big companies have enough money to get permission from whoever they want, so we’ll still end up with proprietary models destroying industries, but only the big corpos will be able to use this tech effectively and everyone else will have to beg. A future like the 70s where the only OS’ and programming languages were proprietary, or the 90s where all the DBs were proprietary. A paradigm where a powerful tech (good or not) is only available to the rich or for rent, is never a good one.
Yeah but this presumes “the best way to beat 'em is to join 'em,” right? Like, when all the operating systems or databases are proprietary, that’s bad because those things are really useful and help you do things better and faster than you would otherwise.
But this argument applied here is like, oh no, what if large entertainment companies start making all their movies out of AI garbage, and everyone else can’t do that because they can’t get the content licensed? Well… what if they do? Does that mean they’re going to be making stuff that’s better? Wouldn’t the best way to compete with that be not to use the technology because you’ll get a higher-quality product? Or are we just giving up on the idea of producing good art at all and conceding that yes we actually only value cheapness and quantity?
Also, just on a personal level, for me as a J. Random Person who uploads creative work to the internet (some of which is in common crawl), but who doesn’t work for a major entertainment corporation that has rights to my work, I would really prefer to have a way to say “sorry no, you can’t use my stuff for this.” I don’t really find “well you see, we need to be able to compete with large entertainment companies in spam content generation, so we need to be able to use your uncompensated labor for our benefit without your permission and without crediting you” particularly compelling.
The point is that this tech is not only made for one reason (replacing artists and authors etc). It has plenty of other valid uses, such as an assistant, a sex toy, personal entertainment etc and probably a lot we don’t know due to how young it is. I don’t want to pre-emptively see all the valid uses locked-in to proprietary models and everyone becoming a serf to openAI to use them.
Call me radical, but I don’t agree that anyone should have the right to tell others how to use their creative work. If you share it, it’s out of your hands. All culture is a remix and has always been this way until the last 120 years. Copyright and Patents have always been a mistake and should be abolished as they achieved the opposite of what they promised.
Haha, sounds like we might have to agree to disagree on this one.
Copyright is much older than 1904, though! It dates back to the printing press, when it became necessary because the new technology made it possible to benefit off writers’ work without compensating them, which made it hard to be a writer as a profession, even though we want people to be able to do that as a society. Hey, wait a minute…
It also kickstarted one of the biggest enclosures in recent memory, where profiteers went around and copyrighted indigenous and folk songs and then went against everyone using them.
writer protection is not where copyright came from
I happen to copyright my output (obviously not here or in other comments). The question I ask myself is: would I be ok if a Nazi organization used my photos in their propaganda? I’m not ok with that, so I like to retain control over who can use my stuff. If someone acceptable were to ask me, I’d let them use my work without compensation.
Death of the Author applies here. One can’t prevent how others interpret their work. The same way a neonazi org might use your work for propaganda, is how leftists repurpose Stonetoss comics for their own purposes. Or rather, it’s not that you can’t prevent it, it’s that the means by which you would try to prevent it, would create a functional dystopia.
If someone acceptable were to ask me, I’d let them use my work without compensation.
Personally speaking, I hate permission culture.
