Speaking as a creative who also has gotten paid for creative work, I'm a bit flustered at how brazenly people just wax poetic about the need for copyright law, especially when the creator or artist them selves are never really considered in the first place.
It's not like yee olde piracy, which can even be ethical (like videogames being unpublished and almost erased from history), but a new form whereby small companies get to join large publishers in screwing over the standalone creator - except this time it isn't by way of predatory contracts, but by sidestepping the creator and farming data from the creator to recreate the same style and form, which could've taken years - even decades to develop.
There's also this idea that "all work is derivative anyways, nothing is original", but that sidesteps the points of having worked to form a style over nigh decades and making a living off it when someone can just come along and undo all that with a press of a button.
If you're libertarian and anarchist, be honest about that. Seems like there are a ton of tech bros who are libertarian and subversive about it to feel smort (the GPL is important btw). But at the end of the day the hidden agenda is clear: someone wants to benifit from somebody else's work without paying them and find the mental and emotional justification to do so. This is bad, because they then justify taking food out of somebody's mouth, which is par for the course in the current economic system.
It's just more proof in the pudding that the capitalist system doesn't work and will always screw the labourer in some way. It's quite possible that only the most famous of artists will be making money directly off their work in the future, similarly to musicians.
As an aside, Jay-Z and Taylor Swift complaining about not getting enough money from Spotify is tone-deaf, because they know they get the bulk of that money anyways, even the money of some account that only plays the same small bands all the time, because of the payout model of Spotify. So the big ones will always, always be more "legitimate" than small artists and in that case they've probably already paid writers and such, but maybe not.. looking at you, Jay-Z.
If the copyright cases get overwritten by the letigous lot known as corporate lawyers and they manage to finger holes into legislation that benifits both IP farmers and corporate interests, by way of models that train AI to be "far enough" away from the source material, we might see a lot of people loose their livelihoods.
Make it make sense, Beehaw =(
The way I see it, art will just take on a completely different scale. With your average independent artist making their own LOTR trilogy or their own Cyberpunk 2077 or generally just VR world building entire parallel universes.
I too hate the corpo version of the metaverse, but I think the idea in general is a sound one, if you can craft it analogously to the fediverse. Powered by FOSS software, built by real passionate people for other regular people.
I've always wanted to get into art, but the scales I would like to achieve are completely unrealistic at the moment, except for like a handful of people that made it to be a creative director on the biggest projects. There's maybe 100 people in the world that get to do that. But AI could enable anyone to work on those scales.
Imagine a world where literally anyone can meticulously craft their own virtual worlds and you can literally visit them, akin to the Elder Scrolls universe but real planet sized.
Imagine actually being able to see your characters come to life and meet them. Control everything from the way the buildings look or what the food is like. That is why I'm excited for AI and why I think we shouldn't just ban it. I 100% get why artists are concerned, but then again imagine your favorite artist could build a world like that. How insanely cool would that be. You can't do that without AI
In my opinion AI is just a very efficient brush. Yeah you can lazily pass of a AI generated art as your own, or you can meticulously craft art with tools like InvokeAI. I think what counts in the end is if the end product has a high quality and has originality. Just because the technology is widely being abused, doesn't make it inherently bad. Beethoven isn't bad just because there are a million people out there trying to scam you into buying their shitty low effort mostly stolen mixtape.
I think AI will hugely empower independent artists to produce more and at a higher quality, more closely fitting their vision.
But even so I can also see a future where AI is devastating to humanity. The saving grace is that the chips needed to run these models are only created in a handful of companies, that could easily be regulated or destroyed. I could envision something similar to how machine guns (fully automatic guns) are regulated, but with AI. Every AI model has to be registered and hardcoded on a chip and there is only a very limited numbe of them. Only licensed individuals can use them and if you aren't licensed law enforcement will fuck you up. This system works extremely well in the US. Or you just ban AI overall, which also seems like a realistic future.
When you get into the physics of it, AI has the potential to be up to 3 million times smarter than us. E.g. thinking 3 million times faster. So there is a real case that we can never compete and we HAVE TO outlaw it if we want to survive.
But then again maybe AI enables fully automated luxury space communism. Who knows.
So I wouldn't despair about it, I think there are just as many likely positive scenarios as there are bad ones.
I would much rather we foster a culture that supports independent artist for their work voluntarily. I think we are already going in the right direction with patreon, buymeacoffe/teespring etc making it infinitely easier for independent creators to make money. We should be working to make that even easier. E.g. when sharing a picture to a platform like Lemmy, it could automatically find the author, like to all their socials and integrate a button to donate to them right in the interface. Increasing P2P support is more my vision of the future for independent artists.