Ed Zitron: this is a declaration of war against creatives and it should be reported as such

this is a declaration of war against creatives and it should be reported as such

In an interview, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati says "some creative jobs maybe will go away" due to AI, "but maybe they shouldn't have been there in the first place" (Kate Irwin/PCMag) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Something about what she said here really got to me. I'm not sure why. It just boils my blood.

These people are soulless. They don't understand what makes us beautiful.

All they care about is making the most money they possibly can, if not infinitely more, with an amount of effort as close to zero as possible. AI.......~coughs~ 'art'....takes absolutely no talent, and thus no effort, while (they think) saving/making them money in advertisement revenue. It's sick.

It shouldn’t surprise me that the very people who say these things would forget that without all the existing human-made artistic ‘content’, they would have no product to sell.

Possibly it angers you because it betrays a contempt for creatives. This is a statement of vindictive jealousy by someone who can't engage their imagination and instead helps build a mechanism to shoddily imitate it for her. Vile, despicable shit.

As a long-time creative professional (graphic design and music), what gets me is the implication that many creative jobs are actually a con, that we’ve been leeching on more “productive” people for far too long. Basically, that we are the welfare queens/lazy moochers of the workplace.

Personally, it's people who never had any creative idea that wasn't in a excel spreadsheet to pump the value of vaporware companies into billions having opinions on creative endeavours.

Very rich of someone who probably lived their all their adult life lips firmly on the tits of VC producing nothing of actual value to people say that "some should have never existed".

The casual ghoulishness of someone hawking their broken shit

It's an extremely bold statement from someone who could be replaced by an RSS feed

It's snooty, soulless scold language. "The arts aren't real work" is the M.O. of joyless tyrants who'd gleefully shove everyone into austere panopticons to do "real work" under their supervision. They constantly stack rank everyone by their utility. They don't think other humans' dreams are valid.

kinda reminds me of how Trump, when asked in 2020 about restaurants going under from COVID, said: "It may not be the same restaurant, it may not be the same ownership, but they’ll all be back." A lot of those struggling restaurants are family businesses, built on years of hard work and sacrifice.

Trump Says Restaurants Will Make a Comeback, Just Maybe With New Ownerswww.eater.com The president’s response to projections that 11 percent of restaurants could go out of business in the next month due to COVID-19 was less than reassuring to current restaurant owners

But to him, a restaurant is just a place to get food. He doesn't give a damn about the people making it, about what the restaurant means to them or what they put into it. So long as there's a restaurant there afterwards, what's the difference?

In the same way, AI types only care about the output. They don't give a damn about the thought or skill that goes into art. They see artists and designers only as the people you go to if you need artwork or design. And if a machine can cough up a passable imitation, what's the difference?

Spoken like someone who believes anyone without a Stem degree is a useless hippy

“Maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place” = “we never wanted to pay for your work, and now that we think we don’t have to, we just can’t WAIT to tell you to go fuck yourselves”

It's just appallingly, unfathomably entitled and nakedly disinterested in the harms she's knowingly perpetrating on the very people who produced the underlying content her service *requires to function*. What a just openly ghoulish thing to say, to publicly say and put your name on.

she’s saying the quiet part loudly, exhibiting a brazen disinterest in hiding the contempt for anyone who isn’t in their clique of tech elite.

It’s caustic

The CTO who claims to be unaware if the world's largest video site is used in training data or not telling others (people who actually make things) that their jobs should have never existing in the first place might be why?

ed as a CTO of an AI company even if u felt this utter contempt against creatives whose work u depend on wouldn't u at least think twice about casually expressing utter said contempt against creatives in public i am just wondering

I wouldn't say this in case somebody heard it and wrote it down. This is the one thing you don't say

Waiting for the John Roberts take ... what? no that's not what I meant! Y'all took it the wrong way

Also I'd like to know what she thinks counts as good.

Sometimes you have to tell people you intend to kill them, as a challenge to see if they can kill you first

Darth, I have a feeling "think twice" is about twice as much effort as any of these c-suite types have ever put into anything they've ever said in public

That would require social skills

"wouldn't u at least think twice" way too much good will to assume, sadly

As an attorney who has worked extensively in music copyright, the AI people do not understand the logical conclusion of their business model. If there is no *individual* to be the copyright holder, there can be no copyright -- which means all AI-generated "content" becomes unprotectable.

Their current projection is that generative art will be so personalized to the consumer that there will be no purpose in copyrighting it. They’re going to charge customers for running their prompts and making art for them, and there will be no business or demand for copies of any particular song.

Justine Bateman had a rant in Deadline during DGA negotiations last year where she summarized the tech/studio plans for this stuff as along the lines of "We'll sell people movies with their voice and likeness playing Iron Man in a procedurally generated story." They won't even bother copyrighting it

None of this seems practical or even like something people would pay money for, at least beyond it being a fad, but the people making this stuff seem to be in this headspace.

It's such a fundamental misunderstanding of art as millennia long human endeavor to connect and communicate with one another. What they want is computer aided onanism.

We already HAVE that.

Then there will be a situation where someone generates a meaningful different iteration of iron man and finds a way to use this to standardise a very obvious way to counterfeit brands. At that point the studios eat themselves. This also is never a product that exists ever

[Proposing something enormously profitable to investors] what if everyone could make and watch their own movies for essentially free?

It's all going to be in DLC and Skinner-box in-media purchases. Pay here to get the new Jarvis voice with Liam Neeson's voice, pay here to make the villain look like your boss, pay here for the needle drop music from your Spotify playlist...

I'm not sure where these people's heads one where it comes to brands anymore, I think we're past Peak Brand when everybody is buying t-shirts, mop detergent and smart home accessories from Shenzen warehouses with names like FABLYNOO and MOGUNNY..

am I crazy or is that not actually a thing anyone actually wants? they keep trying to sell that but I have serious doubts about it being a thing anyone wants to buy. People don't want to see their schlubby self as Iron Man they want to see Robery Downey Jr.

Like everything else I think people would buy the hell out of them for about 6 months and then they’d be massive cringe and people would deny ever being into them.

That is the current state of the law. The services want to see you the access. Spotify model. On demand whatever, but no pesky artists to pay. The law is a moving target. See also: sampling.

The only protection from others copying all of Spotify and providing it at half cost (or free) is copyright.

Which is why an AI SAAS will prefer to sell curation, not audio files. An endless mix just for you.

Not saying this is desirable, but it's a future given current law. I don't think current law is going to stick. Titans gonna fight it out.

It is /so weird/ to me to see companies like Disney going all-in on generative AI. Do they not get that the endgame here is obliterating the value of their own IP?

My machine produced it, ergo...?

The courts have been clear that "my machine produced it . . . " means that there is no copyright -- unless an individual can show creative control over the work to be done by the machine.

"I wrote the code" is to far from the product?

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