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 forward progress for the proliferation of art in society (its crap today, but digital cameras were crap in 2007 and look where they are now).
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?
"How can we monetize art" remains an open question for society, but I certainly don't think that AI without restrictions is going to lead to fewer people with art jobs.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
The lower cost is not the bad thing. Allowing an AI to learn from it and regurgitate is the bad thing. If we can put anything into an AI and then say whatever it spits out is "clean", even though it is obviously imitating what it learned from, whoever puts the investment into trying something new becomes the sucker.
Also, I don't get this weird sense of entitlement people have over someone else's work. Just because it can be copied means it should belong to everyone?
Can you please explain how did you jump to this conclusion?
I fail to see how artistic expression would cease to be a thing and how people will stop liking novelty. And as long as those are a thing, original styles will also be a thing.
If anything, making the entry barriers lower would result in more original styles, as art is [at least] frequently an evolutionary process, where existing ideas meet novel ones and mix in interesting ways. And even for the entirely novel (from-scratch, if that's a thing) ideas will still keep appearing - if someone thinks of something, they're still free to express themselves, as it was always the case. I cannot think of why people would stop painting with brushes, fingers or anything else.
Art exists because of human nature. Nothing changes in this regard.
I'm sorry, but I do not think I understand the idea why and how Studio Ghibli is being "ripped off" in this scenario.
As I've said, art styles are not considered copyrightable. You say I'm missing the point but I fail to see why. I've used lack of copyright protection as a reality check, a verifiable fact that can be used to determine the current consensus on the matter. Based on this lack of legal protection, I'm concluding that the societies have considered it's not something that needs to be protected, and thus that there is no "ripping off" in replicating a successful style. I have no doubts there are plenty of people who would think otherwise (and e.g. say that current state of copyright is not optimal - which can be very true), but they need to argue about copyright protections not technological accessibility. The latter merely exposes the former (by drastically lowering the cost barriers), but is not the root issue.
I also have doubts about your prediction of stagnation, particularly because you seem to ignore the demand side. People want novelty and originality, it was always the case and always will be (or at least for as long as human nature doesn't change). Things will change for sure (they always do), but I don't think a stagnation is a realistic scenario.
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.)
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?)
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> In many cases they can't work, e.g. because of the analog hole
Careful not to confuse illegal with unable.
> [can't work because] the mechanism of operation is observable to anyone who buys the product.
That was my point about increasingly invasive DRM. Without IP law, the only way for large swaths of industry to sustain themselves would be to deal exclusively on extensively secured platforms. Imagine a scenario where all paid services (software, streaming, and quite literally everything else) was only available on hardware attested devices rooted with only one or a few players.
In the hypothetical scenario where it is explicitly legal to copy any binary that you gain possession of (ie copyright doesn't exist) I think that's what we would see.
> If someone had a secret video encoding strategy today, some hobbyists would reverse engineer it and post it on the internet.
Which is why patents exist. When companies decide how much to invest in what this is taken into account.
Notably due to the lack of popularity (and thus lack of adoption) of patent encumbered video and audio standards, anyone trying to make a direct profit effectively dropped out years ago. At this point it's driven by behemoths that realize significant downstream cost savings.
> Have you read a modern patent? They're inscrutable
Yes, I'm aware. Consider how much worse things could be though. No hint, every employee who worked on it under both NDA and non-compete. Imagine how much more difficult the labor market would be to navigate if the government didn't intervene to prevent overbearing terms in such a scenario. Consider what all of this would do to market efficiency.
My point was never to disagree with your broad strokes (that the free market is perfectly capable of functioning in the absence of IP law). Rather it was to point out that despite all the downsides, IP law does clearly offer some collective benefits by significantly reducing incentives that would otherwise drive greedy individuals to act against common interests.
> Imagine a scenario where all paid services (software, streaming, and quite literally everything else) was only available on hardware attested devices rooted with only one or a few players.
We already have some content where this has been attempted. That content is on the piracy sites. And that's when breaking the DRM and piracy sites are both illegal.
They simply wouldn't use a business model where they first make something and then try to charge people for it after. Instead you might have a subscription service, but the subscription is patronage, i.e. you want them to keep producing content and if enough people feel the same way, they make enough to keep doing it. But the content they release is available to everyone.
> every employee who worked on it under both NDA and non-compete. Imagine how much more difficult the labor market would be to navigate if the government didn't intervene to prevent overbearing terms in such a scenario. Consider what all of this would do to market efficiency.
The assumption is that such NDAs would be enforceable. What if they're not?
> Rather it was to point out that despite all the downsides, IP law does clearly offer some collective benefits by significantly reducing incentives that would otherwise drive greedy individuals to act against common interests.
The greedy individuals could be addressed by banning their attempts to reconstitute copyright through thug behavior. The real question is, would we be better off without it, if some things wouldn't be created?
Likely the optimal balance is close to the original copyright terms, i.e. you get 14 years and there is none of this anti-circumvention nonsense which in practice is ineffective at its ostensible purpose and is only used to monopolize consumer devices to try to exclude works that compete with the major incumbents. But the existing system is so far out of whack that it's not clear it's even better than nothing.
We currently have a fairly half assed system that it seems only the movie and music studios are really invested in pushing. I don't see any reason to assume the market would continue behaving the same way if the laws changed.
I think you could reasonably expect the iOS model to become the only way to purchase paid software as well as any number of other things where IP is a concern. You would have hardware backed attestation of an entirely opaque device.
> Likely the optimal balance is close to the original copyright terms
I'm inclined to agree.
> in practice is ineffective at its ostensible purpose and is only used to monopolize consumer devices to try to exclude works that compete with the major incumbents.
I'd argue that was the actual purpose to begin with. Piracy being illegal means that operating at scale and collecting payments becomes just about impossible. DRM on sanctioned platforms means the end user can't trivially shift content between different zones. The cartels are able to maintain market segmentation to maximize licensing revenue. Only those they bless are permitted entry to compete.
> the existing system is so far out of whack that it's not clear it's even better than nothing.
I agree. I think the current system is causing substantial harm for minimal to no benefit relative to the much more limited original copyright terms.
> The assumption is that such NDAs would be enforceable. What if they're not?
So in addition to removing IP legislation this is now a hypothetical scenario were additional regulation barring the sorts of contracts that could potentially fill that void is also introduced?
> The greedy individuals could be addressed by banning their attempts to reconstitute copyright through thug behavior.
You're too focused on copyright. The behavior is simple defense of investment. The players are simply maximizing profit while minimizing risk.
Keep in mind we're not just talking about media here. This applies to all industrial R&D. You're describing removing the legal protections against cloning from the entire economy.
If you systematically strip away all the legal defense strategies then presumably one of two things happens. Either the investment doesn't happen in the first place (on average, which is to say innovation is severely chilled market wide). Or groups take matters into their own hands and we see a resurgence of organized crime. Given the amount of money available to be made by major players whose products possess a technological advantage I'd tend to expect the latter.
I really don't like a scenario where the likes of Nvidia and Intel are strongly incentivized to fund the mob.
It's a huge mistake to assume that no one will step up to the plate to do illegal and potentially outright evil things if there's a large monetary incentive involved. Either a sufficiently low friction legal avenue is provided or society is stuck cleaning up the mess that's left. The fallout of the war on drugs is a prime example of this principle in action.
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?
"How can we monetize art" remains an open question for society, but I certainly don't think that AI without restrictions is going to lead to fewer people with art jobs.