AI Trained on your IP is Not the End of the World
Something has been irritating me about the discussion over AI-generated images and the presumed potential impact on artists.
Yesterday, I drove through America’s “rust belt.” As I look at the once thriving cities and towns of America’s coal and steel country, what I see now resembles a war zone. These burned-out and collapsing buildings and half-abandoned industrial towns look very much like the photos I’ve seen over the past nine months of abandoned regions of Ukraine, from which locals sought refuge during some of the more intense periods of fighting.
This destruction and decay, however, isn’t the result of any armed conflict. Instead, the decay and destruction here were the results of technological change.
This region is dying, along with those left in it, because trade and technological advancement abroad made it cheaper to import steel, and America moved away from coal as its primary source of energy and heating.
In Lilly, Pennsylvania, where my mom grew up, there’s a memorial to “the nobility of labor.”
In the culture here, there’s a very strong emphasis on work ethic and laboring in obscurity as doing your part for the world around you. This is reflected in my family history through my grandfather, who entered the coal mines at the age of 12 and continued mining coal until retirement at ~70. These aren’t people with a very strong sense of entitlement to anything more than the sweat of their brow for a decent wage.
But history is a terrible and unforgiving creature. When it turns on you, you will be lucky if you make it out of the historical moment with so much as your life.
History turned hard on this region.
Over the past 30 years, we’ve lived in a unique historical moment when mass communication has offered us unprecedented new capacities.
Our capacity to reach out and communicate with people today is like nothing else in human history. Likewise, our ability to create new forms of visual art, music, and other forms of creative expression has exploded to a point the world has never known before. Now we’re entering a moment where those two pieces are coming into conflict with a third: our capacity to automate digital technology surpasses our ability to constrain data and information.
History is presently turning on the realms of communications, creativity, and what information can (not may, not should, but CAN) be held as private anymore.
But I’m seeing a ton of people expressing this fundamentally entitled idea that somehow THIS moment is different — that ART is something so profound that it must be protected.
It’s not. There has been an incredible niche period n human history in which a small number of creative folks have been able “to make money doing this rather than having to work a real job.*” But if we’re being honest, all art is essentially narcissistic (not necessarily bad/harmful, but still essentially narcissistic). This idea that the thing you have in you to show the rest of the world is so vital that it MUST get out there to them is a reflection of a sense of self-importance, not of any sort of material utility of the work being done. That’s not to say that it’s NOT important, but rather to shine a harsh and cold light on the reality of who it’s most centrally important to.
The world will survive — and has survived for most of human history — with fewer people experiencing the privilege of making a living from their creativity.
But I don’t even believe that AI-generated image systems — potentially unethical and disruptive to the present moment as they are — are even remotely going to cause the mass extinction of artists or art as we know it. Art has not been killed by previous iterations of technological and philosophical change, and it won’t be destroyed now. On the contrary, what’s presently happening creates many more opportunities for more people to come up with more new avenues toward creative adaptation and self-expression than the jobs it potentially shuts down. AND SHOULDN’T THAT BE THE POINT?
Because whether you do it in obscurity, grinding out sounds and images that ultimately express something of yourself, or you do it for a contract or a paycheck, chances are good that nobody else is going to die (inside themselves or out) if you have to find another means to make a living. So, by all means, please keep creating art. You should — especially if you MUST. But please have a little more perspective when it comes to this sense that how these machines will ultimately (and perhaps inevitably) eat intellectual property— including yours if it’s on the internet — is something everyone else must (or even can) hold you in.
Y’all are creative. You’ll either improvise, adapt, and overcome or be replaced by someone more creative than you.
“Welcome to the desert of the real.**”
It’s a shame it’s this way, but that changes nothing.
*Rust-belter (Mercer to Cleaveland transplant) and creative-person Trent Reznor describing success in the music industry in an interview.
**Jean Baudrillard via the Wachowskis. Look up Simulacra and Simulation for context.
Author’s Note: Struggling to come up with a headline for what I initially wrote as a Facebook post, I attempted to use AI (WordHero) to generate one. As it turned out, the AI was terrible at this, and I just ended up slapping one together. We shall overcome.
