#'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-rambles]

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.

[fatfemmefreaquency]

i think maybe what’s missing in this conversation is a discussion of the fact that we could all consume less, actually

one of the primary concerns in terms of AI criticism is the environmental impact—these generative AI technologies consume a huge amount of energy because they require significant computing power

like yeah—some consumption is necessary for survival. and some is necessary to thrive

but do we really need all of the digital art that we’re producing? through AI??? you need soulless art? really? examine that assumption i think

it’s also worth acknowledging that the art is still going to be somewhat soulless when it’s produced by someone being exploited for their labour

and yeah. it IS exploitation to pay people in the imperial periphery a minuscule amount—most goods cost MORE in the periphery than they do in the imperial core, not less. so paying someone a pittance and acting like they should be grateful for you sending them money at all is weird as fuck

and honestly? yeah, underpaying someone for a job is worse than not paying them at all and them therefore having the time to find other employment for which they are fairly compensated

you are not entitled to others devalued labour just because you live in the imperial core and see it as somehow magnanimous to hire people from the periphery to do work for you—and they do have fewer options for lucrative employment so this idea that theres some big difference between you exploiting them vs. a major corporation is nuts

it IS a “productive analogy” in fact to compare exploitative corporations underpaying labourers in the global south to exploitative citizens of the imperial core underpaying labourers in the global south (idk what that person further up thread was on about with that argument lol)

because these two interactions are the same thing. it’s either a private individual or an organization leveraging the disparity of access to resources between the core vs. the periphery to find ways to underpay for labour. it does not matter if it’s a sweatshop or freelancing: the material impact is the same if it’s you, individually, or if it’s a corporation

but i think what a lot of people in the imperial core forget is this: you can consume less

there is such an entitlement to the goods & services that people at the periphery produce, even among the lowest classes in the imperial core

you do not need cheaply made goods. you do not need goods or services that involve exploiting labourers

there is also an almost staggering sense of entitlement in westerners to natural resources and to energy that, frankly, should not be privately owned

like idk. why should you get to use all that computing power and electricity to produce some shitty AI art?

i don’t actually think you’re entitled to consume those resources, just as much as you’re not actually entitled to the labour of people you refuse to pay a living wage

do you need it? what’s the impact of consuming it and is the cost actually worth the quality of what you get?

i think we all deserve nice things. we all deserve enough to both survive and thrive

but AI art is not a nice thing. it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to us thriving and the cost in terms of energy use, environmental destruction, global warming/ climate change, and other harms caused by the tech industry around it is too fucking much

none of us can afford to foot the bill

go watch some tv show or consume some art that already exists. ideally do it NOT by streaming—you can still buy physical media and watching or viewing it still costs less than streaming does

you know what’s more environmentally and economically sustainable than churning out a bunch of AI Garbage OR exploiting an artist to make something sub-par (because they’re not being paid enough to do their best work)? museums. galleries. being in nature. making your own art. looking at art your family & friends make. there are beautiful and fascinating and worthwhile things to look at in many, many places

i promise it won’t kill you to not have your own personal artists at your beck and call, be they generative AI or underplayed freelancers

i love how many AI art haters will with no self awareness whatsoever ask "ummm why don't you just underpay and exploit someone (probably in the global south) instead of using the evil words machine :/"

[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 😱😱😱