There are so many open letters about AI, I'm starting to wonder whether AI's writing them. The latest protests AI learning from art to make art. But how has art ever been made? I'd hate to see this be a hardening of copyright's restrictions on creation. The letter's language is emotional: "This is effectively the greatest art heist in history... Generative AI art is vampirical, feasting on past generations of artwork even as it sucks the lifeblood from living artists."
https://artisticinquiry.org/AI-Open-Letter
I get it: the fear of economic displacement. This is what the photographers did to illustrators and what the camera-phone is doing to photographers.
McLuhan feared what Xerography would do to writers. These related snippets from my upcoming book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis: 2/
@jeffjarvis
Photographers don't depend on the work of illustrators to produce their photos.
Camera phones don't work by leeching off of the existing work of professional photographers.
AI Art tools are absolutely trained on the prior work of humans, including many creative humans whose livelihoods they may be endangering.
This is a big difference.
