packbat | exploitative AI remarks

Packbats' policy on AI content generation, one swear

Any machine built by scraping massive amounts of training data off the Internet without permission can get fucked.

Any machine designed to divert income from artists, writers, musicians, and other creators to companies, likewise.

That is to say: Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Adobe Firefly, ChatGPT, Bard, and so on - all of them can go straight to hell.

If we share or boost something that uses these tools, please let us know. We will never make anything with any of those.

The thing is, "AI", in its modern deceptive usage, mostly means "neural net". And that makes things a little difficult for us as people who get hinky about the literal meaning of words, because the campaigners we agree with are saying things like "generative AI" and "no AI" and making Human Made logos for humans to put on human art that isn't made out of theft and exploitation ... and yeah, we support that, but that's not what we would say?

Like, we keep pointing to Adam Neely's collaboration with Dadabots. This was a neural net acting as a generative AI creating art ... that is based on two hours of bass playing by a musician who volunteered to have his work used this way, and that creates music that no bass player would ever play at a gig. It's not stealing anyone's creations and it's not stealing anyone's jobs. And it's not stealing credit - for as long as it existed, it had Adam Neely's face plastered on the thumbnail, it was explicitly made with his permission, and had a link to his video about it in the description. And, well, we said what we have to say about a hyperfocus on humanity.

So, like, the AI bubble is toxic but we don't have a pithy way to say it. Except maybe to call them plagiarism machines.

Anyway I don't think we made a post here on Dreamwidth about that shit, so let us say again that these plagiarism machines deserve to be destroyed. And as great as nuance is, it just lends emphasis to that conclusion.