kesbeacon | 💡 Let artists shrug

AI this, AI that, AI the other. You don’t need me to tell you that it’s having a moment, as is the backlash. AI provably is impacting people in certain fields’ ability to find work, AI proponents sure are behaving scummily towards the people whose work they train their creations on, and dear god the environmental impact.

And I’m no friend to it. I don’t use it, I don’t want it anywhere near my work, and I think it’s usually used in ways that are basically worthless. It appears to me to have been pruned and designed to churn out pap in a world that already encourages the creation of more and more and more style without substance.

In short, I'm less worried about it than about the social conditions surrounding it. I don’t want to be too harsh on some of the more hysterical takes I’ve seen out there; social media has a way of collapsing ‘place you go to vent and talk out your fears’ and ‘place you make coherent policy proposals and analyses’ into one spot, and I can’t blame people for using it as designed.*

But here’s my twopenneth. AI (misleadingly named, but that’s a problem for another time) is not the problem. The problem is the conditions that give it the power to do all the things it’s doing. A world that doesn’t value artists or humans in general, a world that incentivises pap and speed and misinformation.

Address those conditions, and AI shrinks to be a fringe tool with a handful of useful applications, which is probably the best we can hope for; things don’t get un-invented, but they do sometimes become obsolete**. But if you go full-bore down the road of, for instance, ‘AI is copyright infringement,’ then you hand a lot of power to big corporations. They can use it to go after ordinary people doing fanart or coming up with vaguely similar ideas, while ordinary artists will never have the time or the energy to go after all the AI companies ‘infringing’ on their copyright.

Better to make it so that artists can just make a living, and when told ‘nee-ner-nee-ner I trained an AI on your work’ they can just go ‘ok enjoy, weirdo,’ and go back to living their lives.

If there is one place where I think a legislative thumb on the scale could help, it’s the environmental cost in water and electricity. I don’t know what that looks like, but it’s the only attack front that I think likely to bring more good than harm.

There’s a preceding bit of my thought on my actual tumblr, along with tumblr user txtttletale whose take on the matter shook loose a couple of thoughts.

*The place this drives me highest up the wall is watching the persistent miscommunication between the two camps when they talk about whether or not to vote Democrat in the US, which, besides being infuriating, offers a fruitful open space for bad actors to poison the discourse and attempt to sway elections.

**We didn’t replace leaded petrol with no petrol, we replaced it with unleaded petrol, and hopefully soon with better public transport infrastructure and electric infrastructure made with components that don’t need rampant cruelty and environmental devastation to create.