I don’t know if it’s just me or what, but I don’t think AI, and eventually androids, replacing humans doing awful grunt work is really bad, it’s a system that refuses to figure out a way to tax corporations using AI to support those displaced workers.
I get it - I appreciate the correction anyway!
Yeah, I shouldn’t have said “literally zero”, but considering how small our community here is compared to Reddit, or Mastodon compared to X, it is, arguably, functionally zero, and something as obscure as a TOS change that allows scraping for AI is much less likely to drive many people off of a site as something as drastic as destroying the entire mobile app ecosystem, ala Reddit.
But it won’t matter, because a mega corp scraping data is going to put it into their TOS and literally zero percent of these people are going to get off Twitter or Bluesky or whatever big website that has an exemption to whatever law is passed to stop the scraping of data.
The only groups who will suffer will be researchers, open source software builders, and pretty much anyone who isn’t a corporation already.
There’s no solution to this that will end with everyone being 100% happy, but keeping the open internet open and continuing this idea that has pretty much persisted from the beginning of the internet, that whatever you put out there is fair game for viewing, is ideal compared to the alternative.
Stuff like this is my biggest reason to believe that the current anti-ai movement is incredibly misled.
They want to stop open scraping, but if they’re successful, only companies like Twitter, Google, Disney, Getty, Adobe, whatever, are going to have their own closed systems that they’ll either charge for or keep themselves to replace workers, instead of the tech being open to all of us.
Open scraping is the only saving grace of all of this tech because it’s going to keep at least a number of options entirely free for anyone who wants to use them.
Still kinda blows my mind how like the most socialist people I know (fellow artists) turned super capitalist the second a tool showed like an inkling of potential to impact their bottom line.
Personally, I’m happy to have my work scraped and permutated by systems that are open to the public. My biggest enemy isn’t the existence of software scraping an open internet, it’s the huge companies who see it as a way to cut us out of the picture.
If we go all copyright crazy on the models for looking at stuff we’ve already posted openly on the internet, the only companies with access to the tools will be those who already control huge amounts of data.
I mean, for real, it’s just mind-blowing seeing the entire artistic community pretty much go full-blown “Metallica with the RIAA” after decades of making the “you wouldn’t download a car” joke.
It’s controversial, to be sure, but I’ve always been of the mind that if someone wants to do something transformative to one of my works, they’ve generated something different, despite being “inspired” by my work.
ML gens are transformative by nature, so I don’t think my work being one of millions of datapoints used to create something is a huge deal.
That said, I’m also an advocate of preservation through piracy, so I’d be a hypocrite if I wanted to go copyright mad at bots for looking at images I uploaded on the public internet.