"Every single piece of research, going all the way back to the early 2000s, shows that whenever you expose people to what’s really going on behind the scenes with surveillance capitalism, they don’t want anything to do [with] it. The only reason we keep engaging with it is because we feel like we have no choice. ...[it] is a colossal market failure. Because it is not giving people what people want. ...everything that's inside that choice [i.e. the choice of picking between convenience and privacy] has been designed to keep us in ignorance." (Kulwin, 2019)

This kind of thing -- corporate giants giving up thousands of papers to AI -- is another instance of people being scared. But it's not fearmongering. Fearmongering implies that we're making up fright where it doesn't really exist; however, there is indeed an awful, fear-inducing precedent set by this action. Researchers now have to live with the idea that corporations, these vast economic superpowers, can suddenly and easily pivot into using all of their content to fuel AI and make millions. This is the same content they spent years on, that they intended for open use in objectively humanity-supporting manners by peers, the same content they had few alternative options for storage/publishing/hosting other than said publishers. Yes, they signed the ToS and now they're eating it. We're evolving towards the future at breakneck pace -- what's next? they worry, what's next?

Speaking of fearmongering, you note that:

an artist getting their style copied

So if I go to an art gallery for inspiration I must declare this in a contract too? This is absurd. But to be fair I’m not surprised. Intellectual property is altogether an absurd notion in the digital age, and insanity like “copyrighting styles” is just the sharpest most obvious edge of it.

I think also the fearmongering about artists is overplayed by people who are not artists.

Ignoring the false equivalency between getting inspiration at an art gallery and feeding millions of artworks into a non-human AI for automated, high-speed, dubious-legality replication and derivation, copyright is how creative workers retain their careers and find incentivization. Your Twitter experiences are anecdotal; in more generalized reality:

1. Chinese illustrator jobs purportedly dropped by 70% in part due to image generators
2. Lesser-known artists are being hindered from making themselves known as visual art venues close themselves to known artists in order to reduce AI-generated issues -- the opposite of democratizing art
3. Artists have reported using image generators to avoid losing their jobs
4. Artists' works, such as those by Hollie Mengert and Karen Hallion among others, have been used without their compensation, attribution, nor consent in training data -- said style mimicries have been described as "invasive" (someone can steal your mode of self-expression) and reputationally damaging -- even if the style mimicries are solely "surface-level"

The above four points were taken from the Proceedings of the 2023 AIII/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (Jiang et al., 2023, section 4.1 and 4.2).

Help me understand your viewpoint. Is copyright nonsensical? Are we hypocrites for worrying about the ways our hosts are using our produced goods? There is a lot of liability and a lot of worry here, but I'm having trouble reconciling: you seem to be implying that this liability and worry are unfounded, but evidence seems to point elsewhere.

Thanks for talking with me! ^ᴗ^

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