It’s controversial, to be sure, but I’ve always been of the mind that if someone wants to do something transformative to one of my works, they’ve generated something different, despite being “inspired” by my work.

ML gens are transformative by nature, so I don’t think my work being one of millions of datapoints used to create something is a huge deal.

That said, I’m also an advocate of preservation through piracy, so I’d be a hypocrite if I wanted to go copyright mad at bots for looking at images I uploaded on the public internet.

I get it - I appreciate the correction anyway!

Yeah, I shouldn’t have said “literally zero”, but considering how small our community here is compared to Reddit, or Mastodon compared to X, it is, arguably, functionally zero, and something as obscure as a TOS change that allows scraping for AI is much less likely to drive many people off of a site as something as drastic as destroying the entire mobile app ecosystem, ala Reddit.

But it won’t matter, because a mega corp scraping data is going to put it into their TOS and literally zero percent of these people are going to get off Twitter or Bluesky or whatever big website that has an exemption to whatever law is passed to stop the scraping of data.

The only groups who will suffer will be researchers, open source software builders, and pretty much anyone who isn’t a corporation already.

There’s no solution to this that will end with everyone being 100% happy, but keeping the open internet open and continuing this idea that has pretty much persisted from the beginning of the internet, that whatever you put out there is fair game for viewing, is ideal compared to the alternative.

Stuff like this is my biggest reason to believe that the current anti-ai movement is incredibly misled.

They want to stop open scraping, but if they’re successful, only companies like Twitter, Google, Disney, Getty, Adobe, whatever, are going to have their own closed systems that they’ll either charge for or keep themselves to replace workers, instead of the tech being open to all of us.

Open scraping is the only saving grace of all of this tech because it’s going to keep at least a number of options entirely free for anyone who wants to use them.

Still kinda blows my mind how like the most socialist people I know (fellow artists) turned super capitalist the second a tool showed like an inkling of potential to impact their bottom line.

Personally, I’m happy to have my work scraped and permutated by systems that are open to the public. My biggest enemy isn’t the existence of software scraping an open internet, it’s the huge companies who see it as a way to cut us out of the picture.

If we go all copyright crazy on the models for looking at stuff we’ve already posted openly on the internet, the only companies with access to the tools will be those who already control huge amounts of data.

I mean, for real, it’s just mind-blowing seeing the entire artistic community pretty much go full-blown “Metallica with the RIAA” after decades of making the “you wouldn’t download a car” joke.

If I recall correctly, they took a photo of a face of a political leader of some sort and then generated an image as a permutation of it - it wasn’t a prompt alone.

There was a time back when gas prices got kinda high when I thought Americans would finally shift down to slightly smaller cars, but now it’s practically a cultural thing for half the country to burn as much fuel as possible, so I suspect even if gas prices here hit Europe levels it wouldn’t cause them to budge much.

It does feel really odd, though, going somewhere like a school and just being absolutely surrounded by huge SUVs and pickup trucks that you know damn well like 90% of the drivers aren’t actually utilizing.

Double-sucks because it’s becoming more and more difficult to find a small car. Everything new, even most cars, are huge.

With that mindset, only the powerful will have access to these models.

Places like Reddit, Google, Facebook, etc, places that can rope you into giving away rights to your data with TOS stipulations.

Locking down everything available on the Internet by piling more bullshit onto already draconian copyright rules isn’t the answer and it surprises the shit out of me how quickly fellow artists, writers, and creatives piled onto the side with Disney, the RIAA, and other former enemies the second they started perceiving ML as a threat to their livelihood.

I do believe restrictions should be looked into when it comes to large organizations and industries replacing creators with ML, but attacking open ML models directly is going to result in the common folk losing access to the tools and corporations continuing to work exactly as they are right now by paying for access to locked-down ML based on content from companies who trade in huge amounts of data.

Not to mention it’s going to give the giants who have been leveraging their copyright powers against just about everyone on the internet more power to do just that. That’s the last thing we need.

You don’t even need to order to see the difference if your local grocery store also delivers. I was curious one day and brought up my local grocery place in one tab, Instacart in the other, and realized I was spending a significant amount more on markups alone using Instacart, not even including delivery charge and tips.

Yep. If the Internet Archive goes down, piracy is going to be the last bastion of preservation for the masses. It’s incredibly fucked up. The whole copyright system is incredibly fucked up.

I suspect after the book loss, copyright lawyers for huge media industries all over the place are drooling over potential earnings.

Makes me feel angry and helpless, honestly. The people in that industry know damn well a rip of an old record isn’t the same as a sanitized digital file, but they don’t care about preserving shit as much as squeezing a few extra bucks from the super fans and history buffs who may enjoy those files.

Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but the recent promotion of paid accounts has created a hostile environment and a wild spread of misinformation on just about any possible post. Staying on a broken platform and continuing to participate on it is extremely undesirable, especially when the owner is outright hostile to the idea that he’s made the platform worse.

I suspect the many people fleeing from Reddit/Spez could commiserate over that notion.

I also disagree that the system Musk has created is “free speech”, considering people who don’t pay are drowned out by those who do.

How would this stop anything, though? Most of the scam sites are one-off things and people call the numbers and are redirected to otherwise legit screen-sharing software to be scammed.

I can’t think of a single specific site that any government could block to stop scams. This shit is just bound to be abused.