maybe the project table was upside-down and things ended in the wrong way
this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Late Stage Capitalism
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You seem to be missing the entire point. An artist makes a work, a company takes that work without paying them, feeds it to an AI, and produces other works which they can use as their own.
The exact mechanisms behind how it works does not matter. Not to mention the fact that not even the people who make LLMs know how their code works. So telling me to examine the code is ridiculous.
This is not about the resulting work being similar it is about the original work by the artist being used to train the AI without their consent, and without compensating them.
When i said the AI is essentially a photo copier i wasn't talking about the technology behind it. That should have been obvious. I was talking about the material reality of what happens.
Photo copier: Original work is scanned -> new work is created from it.
Generative AI: Original work is scanned -> new work is created from it.
They are the same in this regard. Obviously i was not implying that they are the same mechanically.
The part that matters is that the original work is where the labor value is put in. It takes labor to create the original work, but does not take labor to produce the new work. Be that on a photo copier making copies, or on an AI generating stuff.
To pretend as if the AI is just the same as some other artist mimicing a style is to show you have no understanding of the labor theory of value, or you simply do not care for it.
If another artist is mimicing a style they are putting in their own labor to do so. They are adding labor value themselves. They are also using the original work in a consentual manner. When an artist puts out work they are consenting to others viewing it and perhaps taking inspiration from it. What they are NOT consenting to is that work being scraped from the internet, fed into an AI, and used to pump out unlimited new works for someone elses profit. Just as they are not cosenting to someone photo copying their work and doing the same thing.
To try and argue that I'm the one supporting a bourgeois framework when you are the one who is seemingly completely ignoring where the actual value here comes from (the labor) is comical.
You continue to argue against things i never said aswell. Implying i advocated for expaning IP, and ignoring the fact i very clearly made a distinction that i don't support plagarism done by companies. Then implying that whatever i would setup in place of the current system, which i never specified, would somehow benefit companies instead of artists. Funny how you just seem to imagine things I think or say when they arent true. Then argue against those instead of what i actually said. Isn't there a word for that?
You forgot one part in the LTV. When a thing can be created with less labor, all of those things will have less labor value.
If an original gets photocopied 1000x, all of the copies will be worthless, as there was no labor put in. But the copies are indistinguishable from the original, so the original is now also worthless.
Copyright is taking something worthless (copies) and trying to artificially make it worth something, by suppressing people's ability to share.
Now that LLMs exist, making something that could also be made by a LLM has the same labor value as when someone uses a LLM to create it (very little).
Well done for highlighting the LTV the way you did; it is an excellent examination of the defense against proprietorship. (I was deliberating against commenting because it may feel like ganging up on the relative OP here but I felt an upvote was not enough)
Would you approve of AI if companies bought licenses from the artists in their training data? Is this the underlying issue for you, that capitalists aren't playing by their own rules? This is a reasonable grievance but it's hardly communist.
Regarding labor, don't you want people to work less? Yes the machine takes less manpower than a human. That's potentially liberatory. Of course under bourgeois rule, this technology is used to suppress the wages of artists. But that's true for everything, which is why the problem is capitalism itself and why we shouldn't cede control of this new technology to capitalists.
Also I don't mean to put words in your mouth. I asked those questions to get you to think about how the anti-plagiarism laws you want for AI would manifest in real life. And I said that you're an advocate for expanding intellectual property because you're implying that artists should have more protections against having their work copied. When an artist's work cannot be copied without the right granted to you, then they hold the copyright, a form of IP. This is shortsighted because those who are most able to defend their IPs and who have the most IPs to defend are not solo artists, but corporations. Broaden copyright laws and you're directly giving power to Disney and the like.
P.S. chill out, damn. You're being snarky as hell when both me are memorable have been formal with you. I'm not trying to dunk on you and this isn't reddit.
Making the abstract concrete is always a good dialectial materialist approach. It is how we should often dissect a problem as marxists. For anyone still lurking and interested in further reading:
https://redsails.org/artisanal-intelligence/
https://polclarissou.com/boudoir/archive.html
Yet another red sails banger. 🔥🔥🔥