I’ve also heard this argument in the context of copyright. Copyright is not necessary for creativity to happen. Artists are going to art whether or not they get paid for it. The difference is that we, as a society, want artists to be able to live well while dedicating themselves to making art.
The problem with copyright is that it has been weaponized by moneyed interests in a way that often means we get less art, rather than more.
Fan art is incredibly common, and before copyright it was one of the main sources of all art. Almost all the tales of King Arthur are basically fan art. People would take the King Arthur setting and characters and tell their own stories involving those characters. But, in the modern world, copyright law gives companies a way to stop people from telling fan-art stories. As Cory Doctorow has said, at this point adding more copyright protection is basically like giving a bullied kid more lunch money. It’s just going to be passed on to the bullies.
So, now we have a situation where copyright is a pretty shitty tool to help artists because it has mostly been turned into a weapon for corporations to use against artists. Meanwhile, we have “AI” that essentially ignores or bypasses copyright to create “derivative” works that look or sound like the works of certain artists, but where they don’t even get the meagre pennies they get under the old copyright system.
I think we’ve really been at a “burn it all down and start over” phase for a while now, when it comes to how to encourage artists to create art.
A good read that focuses on your post is Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity by Lawrence Lessig.
Lessig has been doing good work for decades.
He’s also a perfect example of how broken the copyright system is, being the target of a DMCA takedown.
Creatives hate AI, full stop. As a musician, I notice that a huge majority of musicians despise that shit. It’s such obvious copyright infringement, but whereas I get a life-crippling fine for using a 2-second sample of someone else’s song, these companies walk away unscathed after scraping every fucking song on the internet. You and me would go to prison for doing that.
You notice how incredibly often failed or failing creatives end up grifting to the right? Nicki Manaj at the Charlie Kirk event. Steven Crowder’s failed acting career. Every dipshit comedian on Joe Rogan scraping for a semblance of relevance. Hitler himself was a failed artist, and it should come as no surprise that fascists and fascist-sympathizers are gung ho for AI in creative fields; they want to control the culture, control the narrative, and ultimately control the public sentiment in their favor.
It’s a fools errand. Art represents individual expression beyond their control and reaches the culture organically and not with an ironclad fist. The kids will be alright.
Love this shill getting ratio’d for trying to equate what’s essentially theft with “democratization”:
Who has claimed AI is necessary for creativity?
Have you visited LinkedIn in the past year? Those people will say anything if it means corporation and AI glazing
I have. I also work with them.
They will go on about efficiency, but I haven’t seen anyone say that creativity requires AI. So this screenshot of text that vaguely fluffs AI hate boners is just… fighting imaginary idiots.
Linkedin is essentially an electronic circus, nothing on there is worth anyone’s time. Its essentially equivalent to 4chan but for corporate edgelords and bootlickers.
Some have ideas but too damn lazy to realize those ideas even if provided with the existing tools.
That stuff was also way more common before the Internet got heavily monetized. People would build flash games just for fun. i.e. Newgrounds
It’s still extremely common now for kids making their own indie games. But instead of a random website they now end up on steam, ios/play store and so on.
itch.io exists and you can play a ton of the games in the browser
and get absolutely infuriated when the wankers at ebaums would steal their work, slap their own name on it, and monetize it.
The people I have encountered who claim ai helps with creativity always seem to assume they are naturally “creative” but are held back by a lack of technical talent. Which is why they sometimes call actual artists “gatekeepers”.
I think this whole belief about ai helping people be creative comes from the belief that creativity and skill are separate things. But if you have ever tried to practice an art you would know they are part of the same whole. You can’t be a creative painter without understanding how to represent a perspective, or understanding how light and shadow interact, etc. You build those understandings through practice. There are no shortcuts.
I am person with lack on creativity and ai with no creativity have more creativity than me, so sometimes i using it as “give me variants” and maybe ill choose one or probably it helps me to choose the way in thoughts to imagine the better variant. Or ill just waste the time with ai…
That’s okay (discounting energy consumption I guess) but you would be wrong if you thought you were creative or an artist doing it.
I was there at the peak Macromedia Flash days. Shit was so fun to play around in, simple enough a 15 year old could work out how to make great animations and interactions but powerful enough to make whole games in and it was the experimentation that led to the creativity.
Kids these days have roblox to play with which looks like it’s got the same type of creative tools so that experimentation is still going on in bedrooms and libraries but it’s just being swamped by so much slop.
Sometimes I see streamers play a game that you wouldn’t believe had been built in Roblox, they look like good quality indie games built around a modern engine.
Yeah but they can’t charge kids to doodle
I mean, art supplies, even if its just pencil and paper, generally cost money and dont last forever, so someone out there is charging for kids doodling. Unless theyre drawing in the dirt with a stick I guess.
> go to ikea > grab their free pencils > grab their free note taking paper > infinite art supply glitchWatch out! That’s just the gateway to more art!
The worse part is, all this slop is going to steal a whole future generations of their artistic voice. This is the point of course. To privatize flatten and centralize all creativity so nothing challenges the project of capital. Even local models are made in a way where everything defaults to a very standard style and discourse that aligns with the techbro overlords.
it’s the revolution of the nostalgic boomers and millennials, unable to accept anything new and forever stuck on the old memberberries they loved so much.
I was typing feedback on something, and in the text box, it kept trying to finish my sentences with suggestions. Somehow it was even worse than how it does it in certain email accounts. I made certain to use different language than what whatever the AI was suggesting to me, in the text box.
It’s trying to take original throught. And yeah, it flattens our voice to all speak and create in this way, the same, standardized, to “maximize” up time and create capital for the overlords.
But the creativity of those kids can’t be turned into something capitalizable because most of them will spend their life doing ‘unskilled’ labor or having their creativity slowly destroyed by corporate work.
