#'if you are consuming the product of someone's labour you should compensate them fairly for it for as long as we live in this shitty

[radley-writes]

Cannot believe that 'access to quality art and writing made by other people is a luxury not a right, and artists and writers deserve to be compensated for their labour, because as much as I believe in the ethos of UBI, we live in a post-capitalist hellscape, and creators need to eat' is a controversial opinion in Leftist spaces.

[arandomassortmentofbytes]

The irony of the previous reblog is people fundamentally have capitalism-brain and it hurts. Even people who would consider themselves fairly left-wing still suffer from the mentality that prices of goods are going up because inflation is real and it hurts everyone when it literally doesn't exist and is the product of a capitalistic mindset. Costs down and profits up all the time means less product at a higher cost to the consumer.

Like I saw someone say before "what would compensation look like for artists whose work was used in AI, there are millions of images, does everyone want like 1/1,000,000 of some compensation deal?"

My response is "Yes, that should happen".

And they're like "WHAT?!??! But how would they afford that??? It would take so long to pay every single artist".

It's like, you understand that all the corporations that own AI are worth several billion right? Obviously, most of the value is held up in stocks which are not immediately liquidate-able but the profit of these companies literally is available. Moreover, if there were legal action, it would come as a class-action lawsuit which would be of great value. Take the Monsanto lawsuit as an example of the amount of money we could be talking about. This case was about pesticides causing cancer, so yes, it's a lot of money because cancer is bad (hot take I know), but fundamentally, an action taken by a company that willfully hurts lots of people financially, physically or psychologically is a big deal regardless of what it is about (if your only remark here is "stop comparing cancer to art theft" you have fundamentally missed the point and are literally incapable of understanding analogies and implications).

At a $1 Billion dollar valuation, 1 million artists would receive $600 each (obviously we have to remove legal fees and it's likely 40% so 600 million to the people). $600 per artist is more than enough to pay for essentially buying their artwork, you know like paying for a commission like normal people do.

The idea that paying each and every artist is a tiresome, loathsome, seemingly pointless endeavour is so deeply capitalistic it's sad. $1 Billion is a lot to you and me, hell even $1 million is, and even a few thousand or hundred can be life or death but given the stock value of tech companies (one's directly involved with AI) are historically overvalued and exist in a market cap of over several trillion dollars, I think they can spare a billion or two. It's literally 0.1% to 1%.

To make that more digestible, if we assume an average of $30,000 annual salary (I know more than is available to a lot of people but let's be a little generous), then 0.1% is $30 or $300 for 1%. That's the full amount, not considering it will be shared amongst all affected artists. Dividing it by (let's say) 1 million artists, that's $0.00003 for a piece of artwork or $0.0003 if it's 1% as I said before.

In fact, take the example I gave before about knitting and GAP. The pandemic hit them (as it hit everyone), so let's take the last 12 years of profit for an average. It made on average $4 Billion dollars profit every year. You might be thinking "Wow, what a successful company", however what GAP has historically done to make more money (not just to hit their bottom line but just MORE money) is to employ child labour. For legal reasons, I should point out that this was "unbeknownst" to them but come on. If Nestlé can do it, everyone can!

Obviously if you're employing children, you are not paying them a fair wage (as is the case in all jobs like this but especially for children), other than the fact they are FORCED to work and are literally shipped over especially to work, they certainly do not earn what they are worth. This is obviously to keep costs down and profits high.

The points I see everyone making about AI and artists is literally the same as going:

"But GAP is a multinational conglomerate that caters to most countries for their clothing needs, they turn cotton and polyester (input data) into clothes (output data), something which is entirely different to what it started out as. They must make a profit to continue functioning so they couldn't possible pay their child labour any MORE money, that would be counterproductive to business. Anyway, it would take so long to pay everyone a fair wage. Imagine going around everyone, handing them checks for their work."

I know right? Imagine paying people for labor.

Die hard AI users are like "AI should have Unequivocal Access to the Entirety of the Internet"

And then have the audacity to complain about the plague of pornbots and how they've become more of a problem

Like

No Way? Really? Are you saying they're more Intelligent than they used to be?

Almost..... Artificially...... Intelligent???

That's such a coincidence 😱😱😱