I heard about C2PA and I don’t believe for a second that it’s not going to be used for surveillance and all that other fun stuff. What’s worse is that they’re apparently trying to make it legally required. It also really annoys me when I see headlines along the lines of “Is AI the end of creativity?!1!” or “AI will help artists, not hurt them!1!!” or something to that effect. So, it got me thinking and I tried to come up with some answers that actually benefit artists and their audience rather that just you know who.
Unfortunately my train of thought keeps barreling out of control to things like, “AI should do the boring stuff, not the fun stuff” and “if people didn’t risk starvation in the first place…” So I thought I’d find out what other people think (search engines have become borderline useless haven’t they).
So what do you think would be the best way to satisfy everyone?
I had 85+ images of my art used to train AI. I think the best solution is for the current AI image training sets to be cleared and rebuilt on copyright free and opt in only content. Similar to stock photography where artists can decide for themselves if they want minimal compensation to contribute their art to the training set. This would be necessary because once the systems have been trained on an image it’s in the memory. So the only way to respect the rights of the artists after the fact is to wipe the computers and start image generation all over again but ethically. I have linked on my Mastodon https://www.youtube.com/live/uoCJun7gkbA?feature=share a senate hearing on the issue in which the lawyer from Universal Music perfectly pointed out “it’d be hard to opt out if you don’t know what has been opted in” . Additionally, this isn’t just an artist issue the training set includes photos from medical records, schools, and personal photos. Basically if you’ve ever posted a photo on the internet there’s a chance it’s in the training set. “have I been trained” is a website where you can see what is included and opt out (though as mentioned earlier that’s not a good solution) I spoke to a prominent IP lawyer in Chicago (before the class action lawsuits were public) and he pointed out that they didn’t have the right to reproduce my artwork into their training set. Their actions have been likened to a smoothie shop. They have the storefront and the blenders but they stole all the ingredients. After it’s blended you may not ALWAYS be able to recognize the strawberries BUT we know they didn’t pay for the fruit. It was stolen for their profit. Why should I be forced to provide the core product of my business to develop the core product of another (for-profit) business?? The senate hearing linked above includes many other important and valid points. Myself and many other artists I know aren’t against AI. I love tech and think it’s really fun and can be helpful, it just needs to be done ethically. I have a lot more I could add to this, hahahaha
Its hard cause even that analogy falls apart, lots of people believe piracy isnt stealing, because the original still exists in its entirety - and with web scraping legal in the US, by putting that image out there you’re indirectly allowing other artists to take ispiration from it - so what morally draws the line between biological and artificial inspiration? Its a moral delemia I havent yet heard a good solution to personally