u/gay_married

The purpose of intellectual property is to take something non-physical and turn it into private property. It is a means of creating passive income from labor, just like any other form of private property. It is a tool for privatizing the means of production of culture and innovation. Intellectual property uses state violence to prevent the free spread of ideas and experiences.

IP is a purely capitalistic concept - invented under capitalism, written by capitalists, for the benefit of capitalists. In practice, it only benefits the wealthy at the expense of the working class. There are countless examples of poor people suing big corporations for violating copyright, only for them to lose the case. On the flip side, extremely popular parts of our shared culture are guarded and gate-kept, preventing the poor from taking part in their evolution and reproduction. This has a deeper effect of all iconoclastic culture that gets too popular eventually coming under the control of capitalists, who co-opt and de-fang it of any revolutionary potential.

IP is incompatible with communism. It is also incompatible with anarchism. These societies would not have the means to enforce it, nor a class of people who could benefit from it.

For generations, the abolition of copyright and intellectual property was a bog-standard leftist position, supported by anyone who called themselves anti-capitalist, communist, anarchist, etc.

Until recently.

The anti-AI movement is utterly and completely in favor of IP - strengthening it, utilizing it to make demands about what algorithms can and cannot do, and using it to justify its moral claims.

The anti-AI movement also often claims to be anti-capitalist or leftist.

Is this a contradiction?

There's something I find really fascinating and I want to start a discussion about it.

When faced with the prospect that they could be replaced by AI in the next decade, how do two groups of skilled professionals respond?

A) Coders - While there is skepticism, there is also a certain amount of grace. Certainly people aren't happy about the idea of losing their lucrative careers, but in general coders I know see the idea that anyone with an idea for a piece of software can make that software with an LLM without learning to code and without hiring a coder as very neat! Revolutionary! Sucks for us, but that's progress for you.

B) Artists - Stable Diffusion please generate me an image representing pure rage and grief, the subject should be looking into the camera with hatred in their eyes, mouth agape, drool and snot and tears leaking from every orifice.

So why this discrepancy? I can think of the following reasons.

1. Coders are already used to the idea that part of their job is to make themselves redundant. Coders make all sorts of software that exists purely to prevent other people from having to learn to code. Coders built WordPress for instance, so that non-technical people could make websites without hiring a coder. Coders build game engines, level editors, simpler languages, visual languages, app builders, RPG makers, etc. It is not normal for coders to see this as "scab behavior", to shame other coders for "taking jobs away from coders", or to deride things made with these tools as "slop" or "soulless" or "lacking in hard work and discipline". Perhaps that shows a lack of class solidarity, or perhaps it shows a selfless dedication to progress and wanting to empower others. You decide!

2. Coders are being made redundant by their own community. Whereas artists are being made redundant by coders. This feels like an attack to artists. It's people from outside their in-group coming to take their jobs away. They don't feel like they had a say.

3. Coders are already used to the idea that they don't own the products of their labor. Whether because NOBODY owns it (open source) or because their employer owns it (closed source), coders learn quickly to not identify with their code, to not attach their ego to it, to not see it as an extension of themselves. Artists on the other hand, especially self-employed and amateur artists, see their work as almost a part of their own body. They see it as a piece of their very soul (see spirituality below), and the idea that their art was used by an algorithm "without their consent" feels like their bodily autonomy has been violated. Coders freely copy from one another without guilt or apology, and offer up their code to be copied by others without insecurity or jealousy. Whereas artists have a complex ethical dynamic around subtle distinctions between plagiarism, sampling, inspiration, and homage. This vast cultural difference is determined largely by economic realities.

4. Spiritual reasons: many people, not just artists, see the artistic creative process of the human mind as fundamentally supernatural, as something that cannot possibly be replicated by a machine that has no "soul". Coders are often atheists/materialists who don't believe in such things.

5. Coders are mostly financially secure, with 401ks and regular access to healthcare. Many coders have NEVER had to struggle financially, and so may not be taking the prospect of no longer having a marketable skill as seriously as perhaps they should be. Whereas most artists have struggled to make money with their craft. Furthermore, the entire time artists were struggling financially, they may have been coping with that stress by telling themselves that at least their skill in art is irreplaceable, even mystical. That it was core to human nature itself. That no machine could ever do it. AI art flies in the face of these coping strategies.

What do you think? Do you disagree with any of these reasons? Do you think I missed any?