I think it's fair to say they're are some significant similarities between the two industries. They both focus on large, multi year creative projects with unknown returns. I'm not sure emulating Hollywood is the answer, but they can at least look at how existing Hollywood unions have approached addressing any similar problems

They’re good for the short term possibly. But longer term, people will be wary of getting in too deep with them and will seek out other alternatives. A game engine like unity thrives on large numbers of skilled users and lots of games using the engine. One of those users or games could’ve been the next big win. Now that might go to unreal instead.

My experience from watching lockpicking lawyer is that locks are just social niceties that tell others ‘please don’t go here’ and have no real ability to stop anyone who doesn’t care. Other than the owner who gets locked out by forgetting their own key of course.

This isn’t true with AI generators. You can absolutely draw in a shitty stick figure with the pose you want and it’ll transform that into a proper artwork with the person in that pose. There are tons and tons of ways to manipulate the the output.

And again, we give copyright to artists that incorporate randomness into their art. If I throw darts at paint filled balloons I get to copyright the output. It would be absolutely impossible to replicate that piece and I only have vague control over the results.

These are my thoughts as well. It seems obvious that putting in ‘cat with a silly hat’ as a prompt is basically the creative equivalent of googling for a picture.

But, as you say, that sort of AI usage is just dumb, bottom tier usage. There’s going to someday be a major, critical piece of art that heavily uses AI assistance in it’s creation and people are going to be surprised that it’s somehow not copyrightable under the laws and rulings they’re working on now.

I remember in the LOTR behind the scenes they talked about how WETA built a game l like software to simulate the massive battle scenes, giving each soldier a series of attacks and hp, etc. They then used this to build out the final CGI.

Stuff like that has already been going on for ages and it’s only going to get more murky as to what ‘AI art’ even means and what is enough human creativity and editing added to the process to make it human created rather than AI created.

Predictable? How are people ‘predicting’ those abstract paintings made by popping balloons or spinning brushes around or randomly flinging paint around. Where does predictable come in? Humans have been incorporating random elements into art for ages.

Following this reasoning (it’ll get misused by the American media mafia), it’s simply better off to get rid of copyright laws altogether, and then create another legal protection to artists both against the American mafia and people using image generators to create rip-offs.

Certainly no disagreement from me on this point

You’re ascribing full human intelligence and sentience to the AI tool by your example which I think is inaccurate. If I build a robot arm to move the paintbrush for me, I would have copyright. If make a program to move the robot arm based on various inputs I would have copyright. Current (effective) AIs prompts are closer to a rudimentary scripting rather than a casual conversation.

AI art is derivative work, and claim that the authors of the works used to train the model shall have partial copyright over it too.

To me this is a potential can of worms. Humans can study and mimic art from other humans. It’s a fundamental part of the learning process.

My understanding of modern AI image generation is that it’s much more advanced than something like music sampling, it’s not just an advanced cut and paste machine mashing art works together. How would you ever determine how much of a particular artists training data was used in the output?

If I create my own unique image in Jackson Pollock’s style I own the entirety of that copyright, with Pollock owning nothing, no matter that everyone would recognize the resemblance in style. Why is AI different?

It feels like expanding the definition of derivative works is more likely to result in companies going after real artists who mimic or are otherwise inspired by Disney/Pixar/etc and attempting to claim partial copyright rather than protecting real artists from AI ripoffs.

A photographer does not give their camera prompts and then evaluate the output.

I understand what you’re trying to say, but I think this will grow increasingly unclear as machines/software continue to play a larger and larger part of the creative process.

I think you can argue that photographers issue commands to their camera and then evaluate the output. Modern digital cameras have made photography almost a statistical exercise rather than a careful creative process. Photographers take hundreds and hundreds of shots and then evaluate which one was best.

Also, AI isn’t some binary on/off. Most major software will begin incorporating AI assistant tools that will further muddy the waters. Is something AI generated if the artist added an extra inch of canvas to a photograph using photoshops new generative fill function so that the subject was better centered in the frame?

Companies aren’t run to earn profit based on goods and services generated anymore. They are investment vehicles for wealthy VC to use and abuse until they run them into the ground while they jump to the next disposable company. Someday this will result in no effective company existing anymore, but the investors don’t care.

If governments were actually functioning they’d recognize this danger and crack down on this behavior because it weakens the country as a whole, but most of the politicians are already bought and paid for.

Almost like voting with your wallet doesn’t actually work. Or only works in same way ‘communism’ and ‘well regulated free market capitalism’ concepts work… in theory only.

Agreed. If we just set this issue aside and focused solely on everything that contributed to making someone want to shoot up a school we’d save far more lives more quickly. I do believe that we need gun control, but like you I don’t think we’ll get it so why waste our time trying for something that will never happen?

It opens a crack to do it again. And again and again. If it didn’t hurt them they wouldn’t fight it so hard. But I do agree we should be trying for something more comprehensive. That said, I don’t think the country is currently capable of doing something like that. We’re too broken.

This feels like shutting down road access to the local stripmall just because the bar there doesn’t properly handle it’s drunks. Oh and leaving that decision up to a private, not elected and not accountable citizen

Exactly. I’m tired of more and more of my life being decided by boardroom execs instead of elected officials. Why are we trying to privatize ethical decision making? Government officials may be only barely accountable, but at least that’s more than a private company. And don’t even get me started on ‘voting with your wallet’. I feel like that phrase is going to be as ridiculed by later generations as we ridicule ‘trickle down economics’.

To me, going after oblique methods (like shutting off basic utilities) just to deal with criminal behavior represents a failure of the system. And the response to that failure shouldn’t be to make these hacky workarounds more accessible, but rather should be addressing the core problems in the first place. We shouldn’t be lobbying to shut off rapists power and water anymore than we should be trying to self sabotage our Internet infrastructure to deal with our rampant hate speech issues. Instead we should focus on actually addressing these issues by proper enforcement of laws we already have (which is often the sole issue), clarifying and updating where appropriate and developing responsive and auditable methods of problematic speech. In a way that isn’t totally up how one CEO feels that day.

Why are we so quick to relinquish control of our digital lives to the very corporations we claim to hate?

I very much appreciate the self publishing that’s been possible, but I do know that the way they enable this is pretty exploitive and I think we still have massive room for improvement. My understanding is that it relies heavily on exclusivity agreements to force the majority of players onto their platform. I think we would’ve seen the Amazon self publishing business smacked down by anti trust lawsuits ages ago if we lived in a more sane timeline.

Despite the exploitation going on now, it’s still better than the old monopolies the traditional publishers held, but I hope we can eventually see self publishing flourish outside of the Amazon ecosystem

Not sure about ‘eye strain’ or sleep quality it whatever, but the lower blue light feels more comfortable to me, which is all I really wanted. I don’t actually care about any quantitative health benefits that may or may not exist.

I mean it won’t be too long until they don’t need any human VAs at all, so they could just completely ignore the union.

Yep, even if they don’t clone an existing VA, they’ll be able to find others willing to sell their voice for AI, or just have an AI generate a voice from a mixture of different people. The existing VAs will then never be hired.

Accurate and well executed computer voice is a goal of too many technologies to remain unsolved for long. It sucks for the VAs, but there’s no way to go back.