Let's take a journey with Jack and the Beanstalk. It starts with a bean, with hopes and dreams, then rockets into a giant's lair we have no idea how to conquer yet. Up you go!
Leonardo Da Vinci had a safebox with priceless items under lock and key. It did not house his finished paintings. Mona Lisa would softly smile in the night at thieves rummaging for the master’s charcoal and pencil sketches. The freshly squeezed ideas before they even landed on the canvas. See, artists needed reference on the human body. There were no photographs. The thieves had the stomach to steal bits of paper from Da Vinci's studio, but what lengths did Davi Vinci go to make those sketches? He had his own racket going. He stole bodies from graves.
No one will fault you for stealing to learn (except maybe the corpse thing). People WILL fault you for stealing for profit. What if you sit in the middle and do both? The global photography community I revolve around has a common point of tension around location scouting. Is it hands off if you’ve found it first? And just don’t want to reveal the location? A more cut and dried scenario is website copy and image theft, where things are reappropriated verbatim. There are whole websites dedicated to calling these instances out.
Now take a step higher, we aren’t stealing to learn, we are only stealing for profit. Big corporation, big profit. Katie Woodger in 2010 has a beautiful sketch of Alice in Wonderland. It was poignant and touching.
A lot of people saw it and were inspired to have a tattoo on their bodies. That's considered homage. Disney saw it, poached it and put it on a hip bag to sell. No contact, no credit. What can you do against a colossus like Disney and that legal battalion?
Now let's go into outer space scale. It's now not just person to person, entities to people, it's now software to people. The imaging AI Stable Diffusion in 2022-2024 scraped 12 million images from Getty Images. Getty has 480,000 creative contributors. AI has created a pop culture of petty theft. There's no escaping it.
It's two days after the election and we already have a d33p fak3 video of Pr3s1dent B1d3n talking about “applesauce for brains” (bear with me on the spelling). It’s basically an SNL sketch but faster than the live writers and actors could ever produce. SNL is a show FAMOUS for the overnights and relentless time grind. The AI video above has been scrubbed SO HARD from the internet I can only find screen caps from countries on the other side of the world. It was flagged and deleted seconds from posting on Facebook. I can't even put tag words, or imaging, or links, ANYTHING. Proof that it's possible to have boundaries on this kind of thing. How can we leverage that power for ourselves? Can the government apply the same effort into imaging protection for us all?
Image (https://www.vishvasnews.com)
Last note, HEY ALEXA. Look up “how to stop being so powerful I fry all the apps in the app store into oblivion when I tap them”
P.S. you try that too and see if AI gets scared and gives up
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