Memes

That's just pure reactionary nonsense I'm afraid. This is an automation tool like any other. The notion that agitprop should be produced in artisanal fashion is beyond absurd, especially given that it tends to have throw away nature to it. Some event happens and people make a meme about it to raise awareness. This is a perfect tool for this sort of thing and it makes it possible for anybody with an idea to flesh it out quickly. It's an equalizer because it lowers the barrier, and one has to be incredibly myopic to not understand this. The only people who are backwards are the ones who keep fighting against use of these tools on the left.

Not only that, but the whole anti AI narrative is literally being promoted by large corps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRq0pESKJgg

Some points from the video to consider

But I'm afraid that if we aren't careful with how we critique the use and abuse of artificial intelligence, we might end up, as leftist philosopher Mark Fischer once warned, foreclosing the possibility of a technologized anti- capitalism. I fear that framing this debate as anti-tech versus pro and handing the pro tech position to the right-wing is a generational blunder. Again, I need you to listen carefully, okay? I don't like big tech. I'm not here to promote a cryptocurrency. No Gen AI was used in the creation of this video. In fact, my videos have been used to train AI against my will. There are legitimate problems with the ways AI is being developed and implemented. And it's not as simple as doing the predictable leftist video essay thing that handwaves problems away by concluding that actually the real problem is capitalism.

But we're stuck with unanswered questions that have kept the left and progressives in a state of constant defense, running aimlessly into the future, swinging a sword around with their eyes closed. What is it exactly that we're fighting for? What is it exactly that we should resist? What are we trying to build? What is foreclosed within this well-intentioned AI backlash? What types of futures are we abandoning in the race to counter AI hype? What regimes of private property are reinforced when AI training is called art theft? Who actually benefits from the narrative that AI is reaping environmental destruction? What are the human costs of anti-tech humanism?

People often think of the battle over AI art as the conflict between the interests of small independent artists versus large multinational corporations. But the full picture is more complicated and in many ways more insidious. In fact, large multinational corporations stand to benefit from the artists arguments in cases like Stability v. Anderson. The anti-AI art movement might actually result in the largest expansion of media corporations power over copyright law in recent memory. Here's the thing about copyright law. Capitalism doesn't really care about artists. It cares about property and therefore the property owning class. In the United States, the dominant intellectual property owning class aren't independent artists. It's the mouse. It's Warner Media, NBC Universal, Paramount, Comcast, not you. When it comes to generative AI, the property owning class is doing everything it can to consolidate its power and promote its interests, even if that means misrepresenting whose interests they defend. One of the artists in the Anderson v. ability case is named Carla Ortiz. She's a concept artist who's worked on big name Marvel films and video games, and she's staunchly opposed to the current uses of generative AI. She's also a board member of the concept art association who in December of 2022 launched a GoFundMe campaign that raised nearly $300,000 for a lobbying effort marketed as protecting artists from AI technologies. So, what did this campaign do to support human artists? Well, for one, the lobbying team at the Concept Art Association join forces with fellow intellectual property associations like the Copyright Alliance. The Copyright Alliance is a nonprofit organization that claims to represent the copyright interests of millions of individual creators and creative organizations in the United States. They are also one of the most powerful and prominent voices when it comes to generative AI and copyright. But the Copyright Alliance does good work, right? We definitely need advocacy groups like the Copyright Alliance to advocate for the interests of small-time exploited creators like Adobe. Oh, uh, and Disney. Okay. Uh, and NBC, Universal, uh, News Corp, Nike, Oracle, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers. Okay. Well, that's unnerving. But these aren't the only people that the Copyright Alliance claims to represent. You can technically sign up to join the organization for free, but whose interests do you think might be disproportionately represented when someone like Troy Dao, the vice president of Disney's government relations and IP legal policy team, sits on the copyright allianc's board of directors, or when their board of directors, is stacked with representatives from America's largest media companies and copyright holders. And it gets worse. The Copyright Alliance has uncomfortably strong ties to the Nichols Group, a consulting firm started by former Republican Senator Don Nichols. When Nichols wasn't consistently trying to make women and gay people's lives worse, he spent much of his time as a corporate shill supporting tax cuts for the wealthy and introducing anti-UN legislation. In 2005, he started a lobbying firm called the Nichols Group, which has consistently sided with big corporate media interests like lobbying for monopolistic media mergers and against net neutrality. The Nicholls Group also lobbies and or works with really awesome people like Coke Industries, giant health insurance companies, Walmart, Exxon Mobile, and Jewel. You literally could not assemble a more evil list. But what does the Nicholls group have to do with the Copyright Alliance? Well, let's check the Copyright Alliance's list of staff in 2008, shortly after its founding. Nickels. Nickels. Nickels. Nickels. Nickels. That's like 25. Okay, so what if tons of Nickel Associates, including one of its founding partners, were on the Copyright Alliance's initial staff list. 2008 was like a 100 years ago. That proves nothing. If only we had firm evidence of a nefarious connection. Something like, I don't know, a copyright alliance member organization sending dues directly to the Nichols Group. But I guess we'll never know. LM2 is a financial disclosure form that labor organizations with receipts of 250,000 or more are required to submit yearly. These contributions are legally required to be disclosed to the public. For example, if we look up one of the copyright allianc's member organizations like the Graphic Artists Guild, tons of reports about their financial transactions come up. So, let's just quickly verify that they really did pay the Copyright Alliance and not the Nicholls Group. Okay, everything looks good. Wait, that address looks familiar.

Wait, no, wait, no. 6013th Street, Sweet 250. That can't be because the Copyright Alliance says they're located at 1331F Street. Okay. Well, uh, maybe they switched addresses or something. What we need to show is that the Graphic Artist Guild sent money meant for the Copyright Alliance to what is exclusively the Nickel Group's address. All right. So, in 2017, the Graphic Artists Guild sent $10,000 to the Copyright Alliance, which is supposed to be located, as it says here, at 60113th Street. According to the Wayback Machine, in 2017, the Copyright Alliance was located at 1331H Street, not 6013th Street. Now, the Nicholls Group. In 2017, they were located at, you guessed it, 60113th Street. So, can anyone please explain why members of the Copyright Alliance have been sending thousands of dollars in member dues to a corporate lobbying group's address for at least a decade? Oh, I know why. Because the Copyright Alliance is a front. The point is that campaigns like this GoFundMe, lawsuits like Stability V. Anderson, the Copyright Alliance's lobbying efforts, all claim to represent the interests of human artists. In theory, they do. and maybe some of the artists on board with the coalition sincerely believe in the work they're doing. This video is absolutely not a call to harass all the plaintiffs of these cases, but in practice, these high-profile efforts to regulate generative AI disproportionately represent the interests of the intellectual property owning class. Now, there are tons of independent artists who own their own intellectual property. But by far, those who stand to benefit from the expansion of copyright law are not independent artists, but the multinational corporations that the copyright alliance represents. The means of artistic production are disproportionately held by media giants, and copyright law keeps it that way. That's why companies like Disney have consistently led the way on copyright expansion in the US, spending millions in lobbying dollars every year. Do independent artists stand to benefit from the expansion of copyright? The answer is usually no. Here's why. If these lawsuits were successful, the end result is not going to be that author's works are excluded from AI training. This is Dave Hansen. He's a copyright attorney and executive director of the Authors Alliance, a nonprofit organization that supports authors who want their work to contribute to the public good. The end result is going to be that we will have a group of very very large tech companies entering into licensing deals with very very large content holders and everybody else gets sort of left out in the cold.