Around a decade ago, I co-organized a regularly scheduled event named CopyNight NYC. As someone working in the film industry who was tasked with issuing DMCA takedowns as a component of my job, and at the same time, someone who at that time was a bit of a free speech absolutist (how times change in so many ways), I was trying to figure out how we should negotiate the tensions between people who make things and shouldn’t be exploited in the process with the obvious impossibility of preventing digital things from being copied, shared, remixed, and repurposed, or even from being sold with no benefit to the maker.
Now that we have AI that has ingested at least some of what humans have made and is taking remix to a singularity-ish level, we’re going to have to have the Napster conversation again, but this time, without the chance to blame people for being thieves. But when writers, artists, musicians or work done by other ‘creators’ becomes just an input for AI, what will that mean?
Part of me thinks it’s kind of no surprise this technology is fast-following the short-lived ‘creator economy’ that also was a driving force behind a lot of scammy blockchain projects and the emergence of extreme power law disparities that meant nearly everyone feeding the maw of the centralized creator platforms got little-to-no compensation for their efforts.
This might prove to be an uniformed take on the whole thing, but to me, most of the creators in the creator economy were simply servants of the consumption-at-all-costs ad-driven models behind social media. If you were able to skim enough of that ad money, you were also likely to be able to work for “brands” and directly shill things yourself.
Meanwhile, somehow people (millennials?) have been convinced that “personalized ads are better” – so they are more likely to get you to buy things they probably don’t need and ultimately burn down the world? I’m happy with my terrible ads for things I couldn’t care less about, tyvm.
Back in the day, I wrote an article in which I proposed that the new digital economy would work for artists if they went direct and didn’t expect to make a fortune, but instead thought of their work as a solo entrepreneur, a “cobbler” in that case.
This seems more true than ever to me now. Artists can succeed when they consider having customers, not the customer of the platform, which incentivizes erasing difference and uniqueness, but people who care about what they do.
This has changed the nature of art-making, I am sure, since there’s some aspect of art we value that might be thought of as “not caring about an audience,” being true to one’s own vision, not “selling out.” But you could also argue that artists can retain that vision if they think not about making art people like but instead, learning how to find and nurture the people who care about the truth as the artist sees it.
Historically, creative work has been something one could do if one was rich, had a benefactor, or was exploited by people who could distribute and/or sell the work. Nothing has changed much, except that it’s perhaps a lot easier from a technical aspect to make things, and for that reason, there’s a lot more to consume, sift through, or pay for.
Is there any real defense of copyright for individual creators? In this new economy, the best bet creators have is to build relationships and community around their work, and in doing so, most likely grow their business slowly, rather than trying to get that one lottery ticket ‘hit’,
But what will Disney do as AI strips out an identity from those using the work? We can hardly have an AI that just leaves out the most popular and capitalized media without creating huge gaps of knowledge- and presumably that cat is way out of the bag by now.
There are so many interesting and possibly radical outcomes of what’s happening with this technology, to state the obvious. My question for the AI: are you just here to keep us captive on our consumer treadmill, or are you going to force people to contend with making their own meaning and coming together as the still-human?