This doesn’t sound far off from a Marxist understanding of it, honestly. It’s built off the uncompensated labor of millions of artists. Once in its mature form I’m sure it could be fairly accurately modeled as an enclosure of commons at the very least.
how is it an enclosure? the “original” works are all exactly where they were when they were scraped. (and the “original” of a digital thing is a real fucken weird concept too, the first time that image existed was in the computer’s RAM, or maybe the pixels in a particular state on the artist’s monitor, the one that you see on the internet is like 5 generations of copy already)
like fuck these companies and the peter theil types behind them to death but superman 4-ing fractions of pennies from the take a penny tray isn’t theft just because you do it a billion times, and copying isn’t theft at all.
I think we’re talking past each other. Your argument applies if we’re talking about a liberal concept of ownership, or maybe judging the morality of ai, but that’s unrelated to a material analysis of it. Generative technology requires massive datasets, which are the result of millions of hours of labor. This isn’t a moral claim at all, it’s simply trying to describe the mechanism at play.
Enclosure in the digital space isn’t an exact parallel to enclosure acts in medieval England. I usually see it applied to the Open Source ecosystem: the products of volunteer labor are enclosed or harvested or adopted by private corporations. Google and Microsoft and Apple all built empires on this mechanism.
I mentioned a “mature” stage because I think the next step is more forceful enclosure and hoarding of datasets. The usability of the internet is quickly decreasing in lockstep with the development of AI, a dialectical evolution. It’s eating away at the foundation upon which it builds itself.
This doesn’t sound far off from a Marxist understanding of it, honestly. It’s built off the uncompensated labor of millions of artists. Once in its mature form I’m sure it could be fairly accurately modeled as an enclosure of commons at the very least.
???
how is it an enclosure? the “original” works are all exactly where they were when they were scraped. (and the “original” of a digital thing is a real fucken weird concept too, the first time that image existed was in the computer’s RAM, or maybe the pixels in a particular state on the artist’s monitor, the one that you see on the internet is like 5 generations of copy already)
like fuck these companies and the peter theil types behind them to death but superman 4-ing fractions of pennies from the take a penny tray isn’t theft just because you do it a billion times, and copying isn’t theft at all.
I think we’re talking past each other. Your argument applies if we’re talking about a liberal concept of ownership, or maybe judging the morality of ai, but that’s unrelated to a material analysis of it. Generative technology requires massive datasets, which are the result of millions of hours of labor. This isn’t a moral claim at all, it’s simply trying to describe the mechanism at play.
Enclosure in the digital space isn’t an exact parallel to enclosure acts in medieval England. I usually see it applied to the Open Source ecosystem: the products of volunteer labor are enclosed or harvested or adopted by private corporations. Google and Microsoft and Apple all built empires on this mechanism.
I mentioned a “mature” stage because I think the next step is more forceful enclosure and hoarding of datasets. The usability of the internet is quickly decreasing in lockstep with the development of AI, a dialectical evolution. It’s eating away at the foundation upon which it builds itself.