[will_walker]

To incentivize artists to create and distribute art. The way we conceive of art as an act of embodied novelty differentiates it from commodities which aim for predictable consistency. Lack of IP protection in our culture has made it impossible for 99.9% of artists to thrive economically. The US has chosen relative cultural poverty compared to other cultures that find non-market mechanisms to support artists.

As an artist starting out in the beginning of my career, I made a rationalized choice to never post my work online - in retrospect this seems to have been the right choice. My work is no AI’s whetstone.

[solarmist]

Artist have always since classical times struggled to support themselves. I don’t think there is any system that would make this a viable career for the number of people who want to pursue it. Same with musicians.

It is a luxury career supported exclusively by surplus. There will always be demand for it, but it is highly elastic and heavily influenced by trends and skewed by the top end.

[hypertele-Xii]

A social security system that supports all artists was put into operation since 1984 in my country of Finland, it's still functioning fine, the only struggle for artists here is substance abuse.

[fauigerzigerk]

By historical standards, most of what is sold today in developed countries is "surplus". The share of GDP that goes to art and entertainment is not constant as your historical comparison suggests. It is growing and will continue to grow. It will eventually outgrow most other industries.

Wherever you stand on copyrights, it would be a mistake to underestimate the central importance of this issue going forward.

[mold_aid]

>It is a luxury career supported exclusively by surplus.

What is your career, precisely?

[jamilton]

>Lack of IP protection in our culture has made it impossible for 99.9% of artists to thrive economically.

Can you explain this position? My understanding is most artists don't thrive economically because there's not much demand for the art they make. I'm not sure that's correct, but "lack of IP protections" seems even less likely for most artists. What protections do you think would help?

It seems to me that the current system primarily benefits corporations who acquire a vast library of IP and can afford to legally defend it all as necessary.

I agree that a different set of policies would result in more art being created and more artists who are able to support themselves doing art, but my immediate assumption of what that would look like is more like funding art educations and exhibitions (of various kinds).

[melagonster]

in Japan, company can't buy the copyright from author, obviously this give artist advantage.

[happymellon]

Historically artists had a real job to fund their art hobby.

The US has cultural poverty because it has decided to support litigation machines.

[Veen]

Historically, artists were independently wealthy (as were early scientists) or they lived off the patronage of the wealthy. Intellectual property and copyright laws allowed art to be a viable commercial venture without direct patronage.

[LawTalkingGuy]

> Lack of IP protection in our culture has made it impossible for 99.9% of artists to thrive economically.

You think we should have 1000x more artists than we do? I think there's another economic problem with that idea...

> The US has chosen relative cultural poverty compared to other cultures that find non-market mechanisms to support artists.

The USA has the largest market in the world for creative products and the most rich artists.

> My work is no AI’s whetstone.

Are you the same way with juniors? "I paid dearly to learn this technique - you should too!"

Aside from overtraining issues, the AI can't store your work anymore than you can store representations of everything you've trained on, it's vastly smaller than the sum of its training data. It distills out features and their combinations.

Some bigname artist is upset because he thinks he's the first one to put certain bat and lizard features on a dragon and that he now owns that entire sort of creature. Turns out though, that given an old picture of a dragon and that single sentence of mine that he could be copied by almost anyone. The only way to keep the AI from "copying" his work is to make sure that, even if not trained on his work, nobody asks it for those features. To satisfy these people it'll have to have a big red sign that says "Dragons are off limits, Bob owns them because you might put claws on the wings!".