Recent legal decisions in copyright suits against AI software-makers have already begun to chip away at tech’s insistence (which is laughable on its face) that there is no substantive difference between an aspiring art student studying a book of Rembrandt paintings in order to paint in the style of Rembrandt and a soulless digital machine imbibing and digesting millions of works of living artists and vomiting out a zombiefied visual slushy in response to keyboard prompts while the tech’s creators claim that the artists used in the training process aren’t owed anything. The more we find out about how the Gen AI sausage is made, the better the chance that this stuff will be properly regulated. I am even starting to think that perhaps that if things keep going this way, the living persons and companies that produced the creative work that AI is being trained on will be able to demand license fees or other payment, as retroactive partial compensation for their stolen labor.
Make no mistake: there is a war going on, waged by the tech sector against individual human creative artists. It’s been going on for over 25 years, in different disguises.
At first, the goal was to build companies and products on the backs of artists without paying them unless forced to, and when forced, to pay as little as possible. Now, the tactics have shifted into what appears to be an endgame phase. This endgame aims to prevent human-produced music, films, visual art, prose—even images and likenesses tied to popular “brands”—from enjoying any sort of copyright protection, so that the owners of technology that would not exist without the work of legions of unpaid artists can build their fortunes and still go to sleep at night feeling certain that they’ll never be regulated, much less punished, for theft of labor and copyright.
What would George Carlin have said about all this? We can speculate, but we’ll never know, because George Carlin has been dead for 16 years. But we do know this: the next time somebody tries to put words in a digitally resurrected version of his mouth, they’ll end up in court.
That’s a net gain for humanity as well as the Carlin estate, and everyone who understands that stealing is bad. And that labor has a price.