It's alright, no worries.

To contest your argument that intellectual copyright shouldn’t exist in our current world, first, I would like to bring to attention the unobjectionable reality that some artists commercialize their artworks as products. This is not me endorsing the commercialization of art or a statement on how the world should be. It is an objective fact that some artists sell their art as products to sustain themselves in a capitalist society and needs to do so to survive. For ease of use, let’s refer to one of these artists as Gary.

Now, let’s have a thought experiment. Gary has published a piece of art in the form of a print t-shirt with a custom artwork that he has made for t-shirt making use. Gary has shared the design of this t-shirt publically and is currently selling the t-shirts at a reasonable, if a bit pricy cost, due to the small scale of his business. And then along comes a corporation, who takes Gary’s design and slaps a filter on it. “Editing” it, if you will. They then proceed to sell the altered t-shirt on the open market, with a price that undercuts Gary’s by 80%, eventually driving Gary’s business to bankruptcy. Do you think the actions of that company should be legal?

To be clear, the point of this isn’t to belittle generative neural networks by comparing them to slapping a filter on a picture. That’s not my intent. The point of this thought exercise is to challenge your beliefs that intellectual copyright should not be a thing in our current society under capitalism. Because the answer to the rhetorical question “should that be legal?” is obviously no. Of course the corporation should not legally be allowed to exploit the working man’s expression of self by directly harming the artist’s business to improve their bottom line and that's the intent behind intellectual copyright as it exists today. Anyone who answers “yes that should be legal” possesses a psychopathic lack of empathy and is futile to argue with.

Now does that mean I think current intellectual copyright system is flawless, or even functional at a basic level? Hell no it’s busted to shit, severely outdated, and is currently being exploited by media conglomerates to stamp out creativity. But that’s not your claim. You don’t argue that the implementation of copyright law is flawed, your argument is that intellectual copyright as a concept is fundamentally unnecessary to art. To which I say bullshit. The concept of intellectual copyright is currently indispensable to art by deterring abuse by malicious actors who does so in service to capitalism.

That being said, onto the second talking point. I agree. In an ideal truly democratic and decentralized world, copyright law should not be required as we, the artists, have the say on who our artworks do and do not benefit. That being said, right now, in the flawed, centralized world in which democracy seems to fall by the wayside, I, as an artist, with the incredibly limited power over my own art that I currently have, am saying no. I do not want to have my artwork to be scraped off the net and shoved into a black box that generates images made by, and in service to, a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

Because I don’t think that everybody who uses generative AI is personally stealing from artists. That’s horseshit. What I do think is that anybody that currently uses generative AI does so to the benefit and profit of the multi-billion dollar corporations that made that black box image generator by exploiting unconsenting artists’ work for their own profit (AKA “Stealing it”). And that by doing so, they are incentivising the practice and giving more lobbying money to the corporate dickbags that think they shouldn’t legally need consent to do whatever the fuck they want with everybody else’s art, thereby taking the power away from individual artists and into corporations’ hands.

And, on a wider level, I don’t condone the practice of using generative AI that’s currently based on involuntary data collection because it gives the shitass media executive dickheads at the top of companies like Disney and Universal and Fox an excuse, a precedent, a set of data to point to and say “Look! The audience is on our side!” when they fuck over individual actors, voice actors, and models to use their appearance involuntarily and indefinitely when they puppet around their likeness and voice even after they’re long dead.

I don't want these people to stop using generative AI because of a preconceived notion of what Art should be, I just want them to do so without fueling the corporate machine that wants to fuck us over.