The whole matter of copyright and art behind agency is not about the art itself, but money. And most artists lose their copyright (contracting to the institution that hired them) even before they completed their work.

So the controversy is not about art, it’s about money, and those who have the money, the capitalists, are eager to remove humans if they can substitute them with machines.

Now as the recent movie Tár points out, art tends to also be a victim of great man theory, the notion that a single person is responsible for art which often has multiple figures involved in its creation (It’s why Tár opens with its full credits rather than posting them all in the end. Generative AI engines only make more clear that art is a compilation of many elements assembled to create a final result.

Now for anarcho-pinko-commies like me, we see us coming to a critical mass where we’re going to have to confront the failure of our work-for-compensation system that we use to keep people alive (and justify keeping them only barely alive enough to do more work for billionaire vanity projects), because as the Twilight Zone episode The Brain Center at Whipples ( Wikipedia article ) shows us, we all will be replaced as soon as upper management can figure out how. (And that includes upper management.)

We’ve watched as Hollywood movies, games and music are more and more informed by profit. They’ve all been moving away from high-risk experimental concept art and towards content as product, hence we have perpetual sequels and cinematic universes and merchandise tie-ins. Verity removedie’s consumerist critique of Harry Potter ( on YouTube ) breaks down how paramount recognized the market interoperability of Harry Potter even before Philospher’s Stone was published for instance noting that 👓🗲 << everyone knows what this represents.

Art is not a celebration of humanity, but expression and beauty, and if AI could produce a fuckton of free art (it can’t, but if it could) then that would benefit a public that has long been denied a global public domain… except if only rich people have access to it, which they’re trying to do right now.

And they’re already looking to secure prioritized access to a lot of things like clean air and water, so what we should be focused on is not that AI is going to replace artists, but that artists (and everyone else) are on the verge of starving.

And yes, I’m used to people not giving much of a fuck until they’re feeling in jeopardy themselves (and then half of them want to kill the Jews over it), so I’m not expecting this to go anywhere yet.