Technology

You’re making a lot of jumps here. Copyright need not be eliminated entirely — that won’t happen anytime soon. But fair use exists for a reason, and generative art is if anything a fair use machine more than a plagiarism one. Everything is a remix, and artists making art using AI tools deserve to be able to monetize that work. I, too, believe artists deserve to get paid. I’ve worked personally helping small artists and creators navigate those waters, writing license agreements and helping them argue fair use to create and monetize their work. Expanding copyright terms further than they are wont help those artists get paid. It will further centralize the major corporations and big tech. It’s a siren song, a distraction from the real issue: that AI represents a far bigger threat than JUST to artists and writers. There is major economic upheaval right around the corner. There will be massive job displacement. Rather than further enriching corporations for misplaced short term gain, we must move to consider how we can allow artists and creators and everyone else with a creative spark to continue to exist and create art without further building up these legacy structures — that are already fraying at the seams and not fulfilling their original purpose, having long since been co-opted by the disneys of the world. We need more fair use, not less. UBI of some form is that answer, as far as I can tell. We need to start providing people the freedom to work on what they want without the crushing pressures of imminent destitution if we hope to have artists making art. I say again: copyright will fundamentally not be the solution to the externalities of AI. We need more creative, more radical solutions. https://abovethelaw.com/legal-innovation-center/2023/07/21/stop-rushing-to-copyright-as-a-tool-to-solve-the-problems-of-ai/