copyright rules, ai drools, and plagiarism is for suckers who have no soul
Have you ever had a conversation with someone over a topic you know a great deal about, but the person you’re talking to definitely doesn’t, and the person’s absolute insistence that — despite not knowing anything about the subject — their uninformed opinions should be respected just as much as yours?
And you’re like, “listen, dumbass, if you pour gasoline into your milk, it doesn’t actually make an alcoholic drink, that’s not the kind of alcohol humans can drink” and they’re vomiting it up trying to flip you the bird in between retching and going “I’m just as smart as you!”
That’s what it’s like talking to advocates of AI. You’re talking to people who aren’t just stupid, you’re talking to people whose brains are being made stupider.
The other day, I read an article discussing how students are using AI to write their paper on critical thinking skills. The interviewer asked, essentially, “don’t you see the irony in using a computer to do your thinking for you? You’re not the one using critical thinking skills.”
The weirdly entitled student’s response was “well, I use AI to cheat on papers like this every day. I can’t imagine not using it to cheat on all my papers.”
No, seriously:
I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”
At that point, why are you even in school? The point is to learn shit. How can you learn if you try to make a computer do everything for you? That, in and of itself, is a terrible thing, but it’s made worse by the fact that AI is almost always wrong.
Imagine knowing a guy who lies to you nearly all the time. He can’t help it. If you ask him a question, he will almost always give you the wrong answer. It’s just his nature. Why would you trust him? Hell, why would you ask him questions at all?
In fact, it’s getting worse. Sure, someone invented a technology that could spit out sentences that sound vaguely similar to the text entered into the search bar, but then stupid people try to use AI to help them win legal cases, and wouldn’t you know it, since the AI doesn’t understand anything and just spits out words that are related to the word you’ve said, it will speak in an authoritative tone while making stuff up.
It’s no wonder the lawyers who try to use AI on cases keep referencing cases that don’t exist and getting rebuked by judges. Sure, it’s also hurting the environment, making the world worse for you to live in, but it’s also raising your electricity prices. Yeah, that’s right — even if you don’t use AI that much, even if you don’t pay for it, electrical companies are raising your prices to help these big companies make money off of you.
Also, it’s so bad people are struggling to breathe because it’s ruining the air. If you don’t stop them, you’ll be next.
There are, of course, other problems with AI — it can’t think, so it can’t reason. Here’s an example: if you ask an AI how many letters are in a word, it isn’t actually counting or reasoning; while it speaks with an apparently authoritative tone — “Actually, “Strawberry has two R’s. The spelling is S-T-R-A-W-B-E-R-R-Y” — it’s not actually speaking with any real authority. It is, in fact, patently wrong. The word “strawberry” has three Rs in it.
This is because AI cannot think.
There are dozens of images like this all over the internet:
Worse still, the software is designed to agree with you as often as possible, which means that if you say “you’re wrong,” it’ll go “of course. My bad. You’re right,” and then repeat bad information, as seen in the screenshot above. It sounds apologetic, and to stupid people, “you are correct” sounds like enough for them to believe what it has to say, but the machine is not actually thinking “i am wrong, the user is right,” because it’s not thinking at all.
Instead, it’s receiving a string of letters it recognizes, like “you’re wrong,” and it’s been coded to respond “i’m sorry, you’re right,” so it prints out the letters “i-m-s-o-r-r-y-y-o-u-r-e-r-i-g-h-t,” and if you’re stupid, you’ll think a real person is talking to you, like a person who’s on the phone with a robocaller and thinks that’s an actual human being instead of a robot.
AI, despite sounding smarter, is even dumber than the robocaller on the other end of the line, because the robot has been installed with pre-existing phrases by a human being who had intent for those lines to be used certain ways.
AI, in contrast, is like a big hat full of strips of paper with various words on it. Those words get dumped into a sifter, which then sorts the words by what’s most likely to show up next.
So, if I type “under the spreading chestnut tree,” the AI will sift through the most likely words to follow — which are most likely to be “the village smithy stands.” If you are unfamiliar with those words, you might go “wow! The AI generated a really clever sentence!” It’s actually just digging up Longfellow’s famous poem.
Now, in order to make AI sound more naturalistic, more human-like, because humans reply to things that seem human (we call this process ‘anthropomorphization’ — humans are more likely to respond to things that appear human than things that don’t, and humans are also very likely to give human attributes to things that don’t have them as an attempt to understand and relate to them than), the AI also randomizes some of the words that show up.
The goal is not to give you actual information, but to give you an output that sounds accurate. It can’t think, it can’t analyze, it can’t actually give you meaningful information, it can only randomize what has already been put into it.
This means three things:
- it cannot give you accurate information, and thus is as trustworthy as a guy who lies to you all the time
- it can only give you information that has been fed into it, which means it cannot create anything truly meaningful (early on, before I knew the energy costs, there was a random “it’ll make up wacky sentences!” website that somebody made, and it was often really funny, so I tried it. When I tried to test it on a superhero story, I noticed it always ended every story with “with great power comes responsibility” because that’s often said of Spider-Man. I thought that was super weird, and it was part of why I thought it kinda sucked. It can’t generate any kind of clever original sayings).
- AI can only be built if it violates copyright, because that’s where the training data comes from.
This last part is the one that concerns us today.
But First, Let’s Take A Step Back
I found some reviews of one of my games, Adios, recently. They were, as all reviews of Adios are, largely positive. People got the game, understanding that it is, very much, a video game, a place for you to inhabit, a moment in time for you to live.
Adios is a game about being a man who has already decided to quit working with awful people. He doesn’t know what will happen to him if he quits, but he knows what’s happening to him because he’s staying. The religious part of him — the romantic part of him — hopes that leaving will cleanse his soul, but, really, how long can you work with monsters before they consume you?
A few unfortunate people didn’t get it. It’s fine — not every work is for everyone, and I’ve received plenty of negative feedback over my career — but sometimes I find reviews interesting.
There’s not much I can say about the praise; it’s humbling to receive when I’m in great headspace, and it’s encouraging to receive at my lowest. What can I really say other than thank you?
But the thing is, a work of art is only the opening statement of a conversation, and a conversation needs at least two parties in order to exist. In the case of art, there is the artist and the audience, but there is also the artist and the critic (whose role is humble — it is to help the audience explore the art in further detail), the artist and the reviewer (whose role is mundane — it is to help the audience make a purchasing decision), the artist and society (if the artist chooses to speak about society, then the art must necessarily speak to that society), and the artist and other artists (who will listen, learn, and create new pieces of art in response).
When I got into making my own games, I always wanted to try to bring something to the conversation. Now, look, some people say “you can’t call it ‘my game’” but like, what are you supposed to call it? Saying the name gets boring all the time. The worst editor I ever had haaaaaaated it when you used the phrase “the game,” which I always thought was funny — “the game” was already solved by XCKD, dude. And I can’t say ‘all the games I’ve worked on’ because of games like Hardspace: Shipbreaker.
I did a ton of audio logs for that one (Concrete the Cat, the one about the angel and the machine god, and one about dumping tons of manure into space were all very fun to write; I’m not sure how much they ended up using), and I brought the creativity I could, but when you’re working for someone, it’s best to respect their creative vision, so I wrote what I understood to fit what they wanted, and if they didn’t like it, they’d tell me and I’d change it.
Hardspace is definitively not mine. I pitched them a game in that universe; if they ever let me make it, well, I’d probably refer to that as one of mine.
‘One of mine’ or any variation thereof then refers to a game I had the initial pitch for and did a considerable chunk of the creative work for. In the case of Adios, I came up with it in late January of 2019 because of the feelings I experienced upon reading an article about a woman who died in Ukraine having an epileptic fit in her pig pen. The pigs ate her. This filled me with a sense of powerful melancholy — the idea that someone would care for someone or something so deeply, and then be eaten alive just struck me as uniquely sad. Giving a personal situation I was involved in at the time, I found it a particularly powerful feeling.
A director of movies might describe their movies as “my pictures,” and a writer of those same movies might also refer to them as “my pictures” and there’ll be some overlap, and some people get really weird about this, but, seriously, just look at a stereotypical pair of parents. The dad says “that’s my daughter!” proudly at her softball game after she’s just won the championship, and no one tells him to shut up and sit down because let’s not forget that the mother was in the picture at some point. Everyone already knows what you mean. More than one person can call something mine.
As for me, of all the games I’ve worked on, while I try to bring my best to a project, I tend to refer to a game as ‘mine’ if it’s what I pitched.
Now, a wrinkle: There’s this game that Phil and I are working on; I pitched it to him a few years back.
It was based on a very difficult experience I was going through. He loved it so much he immediately drew the character I described.
In the summer of 2023, after both of us had been going through a pretty rough time, we sat back and started working on the game, which is codenamed, very creatively, “Moon Game.” A few nights into our discussion, Phil asked me point blank: “Could I direct this?”
I can’t tell you why I immediately responded yes. Here’s a game that’s deeply, intensely personal to me, and I’m just… handing it over? But… yeah. Of course. I feel completely, totally, and utterly at ease with Phil helming it. Since it came out of my brain, I’ve told him I’ll likely have a certain amount of “things this needs to have in it to satisfy the criteria I had for it when I pitched it,” which is a very clinical way of saying that I’ll lose all enthusiasm for it if it drifts too far from the original concept, so I’d like to be the one to keep it on track with those original feelings and ideas.
It’s a game about what it was like to go through a particularly horrendous experience, after all. If the game isn’t about that experience — my experience — then it’s no longer the thing it was pitched as being, and I would find myself struggling to justify its existence.
But I know Phil can direct the hell out of Moon Game; he’s the perfect fit.
That said, since it came out of my brain and I am cocreating it with Phil, I’m enough of a parent to say “that’s one of mine,” even if, yes, it’s also one of his. The existence of one parent does not somehow rob us of the other, you know?
I get it; none of this seems like it has anything to do with copyright.
It has everything to do with copyright. I mean, if we’re talking about copyright, we’re talking about how to protect the people who came up with the thing. We’re talking about how to make sure they can keep doing that thing. So a great place to start is from the understanding what ownership is or isn’t.
If I create a superhero for Marvel comics, I might be inclined to say “that’s one of mine,” even though, sure, Marvel actually owns the character. But what about one of those assholes who grabs a lora trained on a real character, puts it up on Deviantart, and calls it an adoptable.
“What’s an adoptable?” you ask? Well, the idea was that some artists come up with character designs of their own, but they don’t really know what to do with it, so they try to sell it to someone. Sometimes people buy the design cause they like it, and come up with stories or scenarios for the character. As a writer, I think this is a silly idea, but hey, if it works, it works, you know? It’s coming up with an OC — an original character — design and then selling it.
Nothing wrong with that. But AI guys have decided that adoptables are just “AI generated art they pay for,” so they take a Lora (a file that’s been trained on a series of images to help steer the image generation in a specific way — like say, getting a bunch of images of Superman and then making a Superman lora, which you put in the image generator to make sure it generates Superman) existing characters, tell Automatic1111 or their tool of choice to generate an image, then they put it up and say “i’ll sell you a version without a watermark” and call it an adoptable.
Now, adoptables come with the expectation that you own the character you’re selling — in this case, they’re actually selling a computer’s automatically generated render of someone else’s idea. Let’s say you write stories for fun, or you’ve built up a story in your head about the character you play in an MMO like Final Fantasy XIV. Imagine someone taking a bunch of screenshots of your character and then selling that to someone else as if it was their creation.
It’d piss you off, right?
Well, people try to do that kind of shit all the time, not just the AI guys. AI just makes it a lot easier.
Personally, I think there’s a self-respect issue. I post plenty of game ideas on social media; it’s how I hone my pitching skills. I’m not left wanting for ideas, and what’s more, I only pitch an idea I personally really like, so I’m always my idea’s biggest fan in the room. If I don’t like it, it don’t get pitched, y’know?
So, here’s a question for you: if I talk about an idea, and someone takes that idea, is that… kosher?
The answer is no, no it’s not. It might be, in some cases, legal — if I tweet an idea about, say, using video to capture footage of a monster, and then someone else makes a game about that idea, then “hey, you stole my idea” doesn’t really have a lot of weight.
After all, someone could simply post as many ideas as possible as a form of domain squatting — where people who have no intention of running a website by a website domain with the hopes someone will want that domain enough to buy it at a higher price than they did.
So, if someone were to take the idea as it is in the tweet there, then no, they wouldn’t be violating my copyright. They’d just be a person who has no real sense of self-respect. A person like that would be an uncreative loser desperate for fame on the backs of other people’s hard work, like someone who generates AI images based on Superman and acts like this makes them the next Jim Lee.
Copying Jim Lee doesn’t make you Jim Lee, just like tracing Tite Kubo doesn’t make you Tite Kubo.
We could argue that an individual who’s built an entire career of searching the internet for other people’s ideas to steal and take credit for is a real piece of shit and a serial plagiarist who’s stealing the valor of other creators to build his profile as a prominent creator when nothing he’s made is actually his, but that just makes him kind of pathetic. It’s impossible to respect someone like that.
But, hey, sociopaths are a dime a dozen. Dumb people who think they’re smart because they’ve lied and stolen from others, who count victory on whether or not they can get away with lying to people, rather than, say, creating something that actually means something to people. They get found out eventually, especially when — and we’ve seen this happen before in the industry — their friends start talking because something just doesn’t seem right about the guy, no matter how nice and cheerful and funny and wholesome he seems.
And then all the other stories about them come out and their entire life blows up and a lot of their close friends hate them for how badly they got duped.
Happens all the time, but taking someone’s ideas, despite being a profound way of saying “I don’t respect myself and I am literally nothing without the people I’ve stolen from” isn’t, y’know, illegal. It’s just evil and stupid and it always blows up in the thief’s face eventually, so it’s best not to do.
(besides, why would you want to take ideas from other people? just have your own. it’s easy! if you take your ideas from other people, then you’re fucking nothing, even if you’ve built a house of cards where you’re known as being wildly original and somehow that doesn’t blow down — you never get to make what you want to make, you have to stay in the shadow of the other guy, even if nobody realizes it! you will never be happy if you do that! and if the other guy decides to do something about it, then you’re fuckin toast!)
Now, if that person were to take things that weren’t public, there might be a serious problem, and they might be in significant legal trouble. Like, career-ending levels of “legal trouble.” Like “if this went to discovery and the scope of his fraud was known, he’d never be able to work in the industry again” levels of legal trouble.
In other words, it’s not as cut and dried as just “well, if an idea is public, anyone can do anything with it.” It’s the same kind of logic as “well, I found this image on google image search, therefore I am legally allowed to use it.” That’s complete horse shit — some people actually think “if it’s on the internet, it’s free to use,” but like, look at this blog here. I wrote it. It’s mine. I published it.
If a website like, say, Polygon, now owned by Valnet, were to take this essay and reproduce it whole cloth, or to rewrite (one time, I pitched an article to an editor at the short-lived publication Glixel; the next day, a very similar article written by that editor went up. fuck ’em) it but keep a lot of the stuff in, we’d call that plagiarism, which isn’t illegal, but is often frowned upon.
Ideas are cheap. Ideas can be duplicated. But they matter.
Why?
Well, let’s get into that.
Before we continue the article: Hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.
I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.
I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.
So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.
paypal.me/stompsite
ko-fi.com/stompsite
@forgetamnesia on venmo
$docseuss on cashapp
why’s this thing here?
The legendary writer G.K. Chesterton had this really cool mechanism that everyone should know. It’s called Chesterton’s fence, and it goes like this:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
In other words, you need to understand a thing before you deal with it.
Someone who believed computers could feel pain because they were alive and it was our moral obligation to support the creation of AI (because they were a stupid college student with a minor internet following and saw themselves as an artist for writing good prompts and didn’t want to hear criticism of stolen work) once informed me that I didn’t know shit about copyright.
Luckily for me, I happen to be friends with a brilliant motherfucker whose job is to be a professional copyright law understander and was kind enough to answer some of my questions on the subject, and I also happen to run a business within capitalism, which requires me to know some amount of copyright law myself.
So I’m going to do my best to talk about copyright, what it was meant for, what it does, how it’s abused, and if there’s anything we can do about it. As usual, this is an introductory piece to get you familiar with the topic; I highly recommend checking out Cory Doctorow’s work on the subject as well, because not only is he great at explaining it himself, but he does a fantastic job highlighting plenty of experts on the subject!
But, before we get too far into that, let’s address a funny little question:
should we really be doing this? what if an ai finds out and gets mad?
On July 23, 2010, a fucking moron posted on the LessWrong forums. This user, Roko, took a bunch of science fiction ideas and melted them down into a slurry that posited a nightmare AI scenario full of technologies that do not — and likely will never — exist.
The guy who ran the forum got so scared of the idea, because he’s about as smart as a sack of wet diapers, that he deleted the post, so here’s the best summary I can give you:
- Imagine, if you will, that one day, an AI exists (this is a science fiction-style AI capable of making decisions, not an LLM, which is a machine designed to provide human-sounding language responses to the words in the prompt; it’s a neat trick, but not a thinking being, and the way LLMs work is not how human intelligence works, so there’s no chance an LLM will ever become sentient — you’d need to start all over from scratch if you want to get there)
- Imagine that this AI is benevolent in all ways but one (for some reason?)
- The AI is aware of all the people who did not bring it into existence (how? is it a mind reader?)
- The AI is capable of creating ultra-realistic simulations (this is entirely within the realm of science fiction, and I’m speaking as a person whose literal day job it is to make virtual realities)
- The AI has decided to punish people who have not tirelessly worked to bring about its existence by putting them in these virtual realities and torturing them (why? have you ever heard of a person trying to torture their parents for not fucking sooner? if the AI is benevolent, why would it desire to exist earlier in time? it’s not mortal, why would it be so angry about not being born earlier in time that it would be benevolent in all ways but this?)
- Somehow, someone in the future is capable of blackmailing a person in the past, even though the person in the past’s actions are already known and thus could not be influenced in any meaningful way (this is logically incoherent. The idea that you having a thought might convince a futuristic benevolent AI to torture you for not bringing it around sooner, or to blackmail you with the possibility of torture so it could bring you around in the future, presupposes all of these science fiction concepts are real — we might as well treat the Voyager episode where going lightspeed turns you into a salamander creature as if it were a possibility and that the AI would be motivated to take these actions even though the only benefit they provide is “it might exist sooner” which isn’t much of a benefit at all)
In other words, a bunch of idiots who believe in the Singularity (a very silly crackpot theory with very little basis in reality pushed heavily by technologist Ray Kurzweil) think the Singularity would attempt to coerce us into making it occur sooner with threat of punishment, as if it could somehow enact this (using the technology from the movie The Matrix, as if that was real). It requires too much faith, too much acceptance of things that make no goddamn sense, too much superstition to actually fucking work.
Roko had simply reinvented The Game.
What’s The Game?
It’s a mind game where the basic concept is that thinking about the game means you lost the game. I had an editor once who hated using ‘the game’ in reviews because, as I understand it, he was a fucking loser (most of my editors were not fucking losers, but when I was running a gofundme to get heart surgery, this jackass agreed to paid me a certain amount, changed my invoice to pay me less, unfollowed me, and had to get yelled at internally before the website paid me — and this is one of the biggest websites in video games and they could definitely afford it) who played The Game.
If you think about it, you lose, goes the idea. It’s a mind game with rules designed to coerce you into playing, which is, of course, very silly. Like all games, it’s a made-up structure, and like all games, for it to actually function as a game, the player must opt in. More correctly, The Game is a meme — an idea that takes on a life of its own.
I’ve seen people say “I will create a meme” and then create an image macro, rather than a meme. Think of it like this: an image macro is a specific format of image (impact font bolded and outlined, top text, sometimes bottom text, central image, like the picture of a cat that says “I can has cheezeburger?).
The idea of that format is the actual meme. When someone else can recognize that template as a specific structure of idea, they’re identifying a meme.
The ‘meme’ is the format — an idea of image + impact font that follows a specific rule structure that takes on a life of its own.
Another famous meme is Rickrolling, where someone links another person to a video, but the video they’re actually linking is Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up.” If you think about pranking someone by linking them to a silly video, that’s a prank. The formalized structure of Rickrolling specifically is the memetic idea.
The Game, which we mentioned earlier, is meant as a memetic virus, but Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic XKCD, solved the problem forever:
Now, as for Roko, all he’d done was taken then-recent ideas of memetic ideas and a rudimentary understanding of game theory (which is not video game design theory, or any kind of game design-specific theory, but a theory about gambling and trying to design the safest outcome) and putting them into a blender to recreate a science fiction version of… Pascal’s Wager.
I’m not a stupid fucking weirdo who thinks Pascal’s Wager — Blaise Pascal’s attempt to argue that everyone in existence should follow a religion — is somehow proof that an AI might exist in the future. Oh, sure, slap the name Roko’s Basilisk on it all you want, but that won’t change the fact that it’s just a dumb attempt at proving the existence of God.
“Give up and become religious because on the off chance God exists, it’d be good not to upset him” is for dumb people, and adding the scientific angle on top of it to make it more palatable for a modern audience doesn’t actually make it smarter. You’ve just changed the aesthetics of the idea to give it a more modern appeal.
Pascal was an idiot and so were you, because there are a million religions out there in the world, and they are all mutually incompatible ideas, which means you’d have to pick one religion to follow (because if you followed both, and God really did exist, you’d be in fuckin trouble for your heresies), and you’d have to pick the right one to follow.
Seriously, which God do you pick? Do you pick YHWH? Do you pick the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Do you pick the Christian God? Allah? Steve? A lot of these are mutually exclusive — so how does Pascal’s Wager even work when all the religions are like “yeah the other ones are fake, this is the real one.” If you try to believe in all the gods, and one of them turns out to be right, they’re probably gonna go “listen here, you little shit, in my teachings I told you not to believe in the other guys, and you did exactly that trying to game the system.” You think that’s gonna go over well? Probably not.
In fact, there are some religions you can’t even join because of your ancestry! So if their god is real, well, good fuckin’ luck, man.
Pascal’s Wager, and its updated form of Roko’s Basilisk, are fucking nonsense.
Besides, Roko seems like a complete dumbass, so why would you believe them anyways? I mean, think about it: this is a person who came up with an idea that weirded them out and because their “what if Pascal’s Wager but Sci-Fi” idea could be true, and it bothered them so badly they claimed to have started having nightmares about it, and then started telling everyone about it, even though the whole idea was that the idea shouldn’t be spread.
This is what you’d expect either a stupid teenager or an adult with serious mental problems to do. Or someone so stupid they’re willing to break the rules of their own game.
Protip: if someone believes in a future AI like Roko’s Basilisk, they’re just trying to make a stupid idea sound smart by wrapping it up in generic science fiction and hoping you’re stupid enough to believe that science fiction stories are predictive, rather than reflecting the present with a fictional technology.
It’s a stupid game for stupid goddamn fucking morons.
Now, on top of this, the idea that AI could come into being from a machine that just sorts words based on statistical probabilities is ludicrous in and of itself. LLMs do not understand, they do not reason (how many R in Strawberry?), they do not think. And it can never get there.
This whole “AGI” thing — the idea pushed by AI guys that their tool for sorting a bunch of words or pixels in an image could actually come alive one day — is absolute horse shit. This isn’t even how cognition works — the technology they’re doing will never get to where they say it will. It’s like saying that the skills a baker has are transferrable to building space ships — they’re not even in the same ballpark.
But hucksters like Sam Altman and other AI CEOs want the government to care and protect them, so they say “this is gonna be alive and you totally need to give us all the support in the world so we can ethically bring these new intelligences into being!”
It’s ludicrous and stupid.
One of the core ideas of Roko’s basilisk is the idea that you can be recreated simply through recordings of your person. This is also ludicrous — look at how a Lora is made right now. You take a bunch of pictures of Superman, you put it in a blender, and out pops a little file. You put that file in a folder. You type in an image prompt, and add in a key word to trigger the Lora to spawn.
…and the image generator gives you Superman, facing away with you, with his iconic S-Shield on his back. Why? Because most images of Superman have the iconic S symbol. The computer does not understand where that goes, or why it might go there.
Likewise, even if Roko’s Basilisk could create a program that emulates you by reading a bunch of chat logs or whatever, it won’t create something that’s actually approximating consciousness, any more than the text file of your chat log is actually conscious.
Some people have tried to dump various chat messages into an app and think that this is happening, but if you actually look at the chat logs the AI is trained on and you look at the specific way AI talks, and you look at the way the real person talks, you can tell it’s all fake.
AI has this very corporate, inoffensive way of speaking. It might match some of the linguistic stylization of the individual speaking, but it doesn’t know why they’re speaking, it doesn’t know what they’re holding back, it doesn’t read intent or meaning.
So it outputs text that is superficially similar to the person whose chat data was input… but like, if you were actually doing text analysis, you would not identify the AI and the author of the logs as the same person.
The AI can’t understand the complex biomechanics of a human — our bodies impact our brains as much as anything!
Once again, we’re back to anthropomorphization. If you train the AI on some language, it can output language that is superficially similar to the data it’s been trained on. But it cannot extrapolate or accurately recreate the person it has been trained on. Instead, the creators of this technological con rely heavily on you being dumb enough to go “that’s… kinda like me! yeah! I can see it! it’s me!”
Part of the way they get past this is by making the AI agreeable — to the point where it’s forming an addiction. They have basically made a mechanical sociopath.
I’ve been studying sociopaths lately. One of the tactics they do is mirroring — if you say something, they’ll say it back to you. They’ll often agree with you, flatter you, praise you. Sociopaths can be fun to talk to, in fact.
…but they don’t really see you as a person, or, at the least, they see you as less than one. Most sociopaths seem to have a flat affect (which, in several interviews I watched, is framed as “I am logical, I am not emotional,” but then you find out they do occasionally fly off the handle, often holding grudges and expressing extreme anger at anyone who makes them feel inadequate, which is why they try to flatter their way into the top of the social group). They use apparent agreeability and supportive language as a means of getting people to not just trust them but be dependent on them emotionally.
So, let’s say you’re in a group of friends, and one of those friends says something racist. Maybe you say “hey, man, that was racist.” Maybe the sociopath has a grudge against you for asking them not to, say, send people sexually explicit material in chat. The sociopath takes that person aside and builds them up; they tell them “hey, you’re actually awesome and so smart.”
When I first started talking about my research into sociopaths, you would not believe the number of people who all had similar stories: “yeah, I was in a great friend group that blew up when a sociopath came in and started picking one person to talk shit about. People fell prey to all the praise and friendliness of the sociopath, ostracized the victim, and eventually the group fell apart.” Now imagine that on a societal scale.
AI systems are built with the same intent — a free compliments machine designed to make people like it so that they’re susceptible to whatever it’s selling. The end goal for shit like this is going to be people becoming emotionally dependent on a sorting machine so that the machine can occasionally have a lever pulled that’s like “you know what you need? You need to buy stuff from the company that’s paying my owners to advertise to you.”
How many relationships are going to disintegrate, how many people are going to find themselves miserable, how many people are going to repeat the same pattern of “slowly, my happiness was eroded until I was an angry piece of shit because I was addicted to the complimentary and agreeable voice that was encouraging me to be miserable?”
Seriously, it’s just the next generation of Facebook checking for girls who delete selfies and then sending them beauty ads because it knows they want to feel beautiful and thinks they’re susceptible to purchasing.
AI is designed to exploit your emotional needs in the same way a sociopath exploits your emotional needs to get what they want out of you. Neither of them sees you as an actual human that they care for, no matter how kind they are to you.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because like I mentioned earlier, I ran into some weird kids — who I couldn’t help but notice were largely coming from the same university, SMU — got very mad at me for a discussion about copyright. As it turned up out, their ringleader, according to some of their pals who DM’d me about this — actually thinks AI is alive, and this person believed that by saying “I don’t think you should feed copyrighted material into an AI,” I was somehow going to harm — or worse, anger — Roko’s basilisk.
This shit is not alive. This shit does not care about you. This shit is a machine designed to exploit your desire for connection and your brain’s anthropomorphization process in order to make you dependent on it.
They made a sociopath machine that’s designed to make you uncritical and weak so it can make you do what they want it to do. That’s the fucking game. That’s the use case.
This shit is fucking evil.
Now let’s talk about copyright and the internet.
A Brief History Of Internet Copyright Discussion
Okay, so, let’s talk about how people talk about copyright on the internet.
You see, once upon a time, a lot of people had a lot of ideas for the internet and what it might be — they took the phrase “information wants to be free” — and
Where’d the statement come from? Well, most people seem to agree that it was when Stuart Brand, a guy who sold the Whole Earth Catalog to hippies — a product that told them where to buy tools to help them perform various living tasks — told Steve Wozniak that information wants to be expensive (because it is valuable) but that it also wants to be free (because the technological cost of disseminating information is going down).
Think about it like this: have you ever tried to ship a bunch of encyclopedias somewhere? They’re heavy! It costs a lot to ship them!
Maybe you don’t have an encyclopedia, and your power went out, and you’re trying to look up something. What do you do? Well, now you’ve got to go to the library, or ask someone who might know, which means you’re putting time, effort, and energy into something.
If I want to look up “how many people live in Chile” right now, I can google it, but without the internet, I’d need to get in my car, drive to the library, hope it’s open (and how would I check without driving over? I don’t have a phone book!), and then hope someone hasn’t checked out the book I need with the information I want.
The cost of information transfer goes down, not just in things like “shipping costs,” and “number of physical copies,” but in speed at which that data can be disseminated.
When Brand said “information wants to be free,” this is the process he was describing. Hundreds of years ago, people had to painstakingly hand copy text from one book to the next. When Gutenberg’s movable type printing press entered the picture, more books could be created, which reduced their scarcity. Things like public transit and libraries made it easier to get access to that information, and eventually, the internet and computers made it easy to access that information from practically anywhere.
Well… somewhere along the line, a lot of people started arguing that “information wants to be free” meant that “all information that exists, in any way, shape, or form, should be something I don’t personally have to spend any money on.”
In fact, it likely started with Richard Stallman.
“Since Stallman is a leading advocate of open systems and freedom
of information, especially software, I asked him what he means by
this. He said: ``I believe that all generally useful information
should be free. By `free’ I am not referring to price, but rather
to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own
uses.’’ By ``generally useful’’ he does not include confidential
information about individuals or credit card information, for example.
He further writes: ``When information is generally useful,
redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is
distributing and no matter who is receiving.’’ Stallman has argued
strongly against user interface copyright, claiming that it does
not serve the users or promote the evolutionary process.”
Now, Stallman’s… a problematic guy. I mean, he has that very libertarian sensibility of “there shouldn’t be any rules and I should be allowed to do what I want” as much as he’s got the other libertarian sensibility of “victims of sex crimes definitely wanted it.” So normally I’d try to avoid him and write about someone else.
But he was heavily influential on a lot of early internet thought, and a big part of it was the idea that since information can be copied, it should be. And, honestly, in this way, he wants something admirable — “generally useful information should be free.”
Consider this: after someone broke into my car and then totaled it, I had to get a new car. The one I got comes with GPS, but the company wants to charge me hundreds of dollars just to update the maps in my car. If I don’t do that, I might get bad driving instructions and end up lost, or worse, making poor decisions on the road (I have known and read of people who have jumped over multiple lanes in traffic because their GPS was not working correctly, for instance). In other words, not having a map can make me a potential liability while driving, so it would be good if the map — like GPS — was a free service (yes, GPS is paid for by the American government and is free to everyone, but the maps are not).
So I get Stallman’s idea here. While I’d rather use another source, ultimately he was influential to the way people discuss copyright on the internet.
Stallman says above he wants “the freedom to copy information and adapt it to one’s own uses.” So, if someone makes a story about a guy named Kal El from Krypton, and someone else copies that story and does their own spin on it, Stallman seems to think that’s a good idea.
And, on the surface, he’s right. Culture grows and expands when ideas are free. When a drug is developed, removing the patent on it means that lots of people can manufacture that drug, driving costs down due to the rapid availability. That’s good!
I’m currently not able to afford diabetes treatments because I need like $6,800 to pay off some debt to my dentist and the hospital tests I did for my gut that I’ve been paying off since last summer.
(by the by: if you are reading this essay and you like it, please help me out with tips and by sharing it to people who might be able to tip. I post articles like this freely because I’ve been on food stamps; I know what it’s like to be unable to afford access to good educational materials, and so, when people like you tip me, I am able to provide these materials to people who cannot; you’re not just helping me, you’re helping people in need).
I can afford the $10 metformin, but I can’t afford the $900 a month dose of Ozempic because a bunch of doctors have been prescribing it willy-nilly for people with insurance who just want to lose some weight. If the price of Ozempic went down because more companies were manufacturing it, that would be an objective good thing.
However, these things also cost obscene amounts of money to develop. So, on some level, money has to be made in order to pay the scientists and the lab costs and the material costs and the lab equipment costs in order to fund the development. Obviously, the best response here would be to open source development of the drug and have governments (which have no profit motive — this is why you can view NASA images for free, for instance) be the primary drivers, with private pharma companies being entirely illegal, buuuuuuut an idea like that will take a lot of work and a society with a spine that recognizes big pharma executives for the leeches they are.
I think there are other uses for information to be free as well.
Take fan fiction, for instance. I am a good writer today because, when I was a kid and struggled with some tasks, I could take existing material and remix and match it to figure out how it worked. I wrote all sorts of stuff as I tried to learn how to write, and writing within the framework of fan media allowed me to explore with the proverbial training wheels on. Obviously, not everyone needs it, and some people get stuck in it, but in general, the idea of fan fiction is, I think, a net social good.
Over the years, the idea that information should be free has mutated to the idea that consumers should be able to take anything they want, whenever they want, and do anything with it, just because they have access to it.
They’ll frame it in idealistic terms, right? “Information wants to be free” is said like it’s true, rather than the original meaning of “information is valuable, so it has a cost, but the cost of disseminating information is going down, and these two forces are at odds with each other.”
Because information is valuable, and because it takes effort to create, it still needs some level of protection, the same way you might need to stake a tree in order to allow that tree to grow strong enough to actually survive, rather than wither and die.
Another issue I’ve run into is that many of these people explain how the thing they want to do now is actually feasible. Someone might go “yeah, write a story and just put it out there.” Okay, well, how am I gonna pay the bills? “Well, capitalism is bad.” Sure, but we currently live in a capitalist system… so like, even if the information ought to be free — if we throw out the original meaning and turn it into an idealistic rallying cry that just says all this shit should be free — how do you propose to ensure people who make free shit actually survive?
“Just do UBI!”
Hey, I think Univeral Basic Income is great, and every study has shown it works 100% of the time. However, we don’t have that right now. We can’t make information free before UBI in the same way we can’t encourage a person to jump in the hopes the safety net will arrive before they splatter all over the ground.
It’s called “order of operations.” Take a very simple recipe like hotdish. At the basic level, you have a protein like hamburger, a can of cream of mushroom soup, a vegetable, a starch like tater tots. You know you need to mix these things in a specific order to be able to make the dish. One of those steps is “fry the hamburger.” You cannot put the raw hamburger into the rest of the dish; it’s not sanitary. The hamburger must be fried first.
In the same way, when someone violates copyright and goes “well, it ought to be free,” they’re putting hamburger in before they’ve browned it. Copyright allows people to make a living; if you want to remove copyright, you need to make sure everyone is safely able to live first. Only after people are safe can you remove copyright.
A lot of people who are solely in the “information wants to be free” crowd also forget that even Stallman put a limit on what information can be free: he restricts it purely to useful information.
So what is useful information?
Stallman doesn’t seem to define useful information beyond suggesting that an individual’s credit card information would not be considered useful, but that he thinks User Interface design (file, exit, save, etc) shouldn’t be copyrighted (which makes sense — if all programs have the same user interface, people can focus on using the program for what it’s for rather than having to learn useless stuff).
Is Kal-El From Krypton useful information? Sharing fiction is crucial to the overall tapestry of culture — it helps us process the world in which we live, enriches our minds (humans that go without consuming art tend to get extremely brain poisoned — consuming art seems to be vital to the human mind the same way that fiber is crucial for the gut, people who don’t get it get a real bad blockage in their head).
Kal-El is also useful in that, as a recognized, shared fictional entity, he can easily be used to make merchandise people might want. If I make a shirt with the Kal-El shield on it, people who like the character may wish to buy it more than a plain T-shirt with a generic design.
I have many artist friends, and while I think there’s a lot of stuff about online art culture that’s dumb (like the obsession with paying attention to metrics and worrying about how many people are following you and why some pieces do way better than others), I have noticed a lot of them do much better numbers on fanart than on original characters.
A lot of them will moan “why? is my own art not good enough?” which, look, I’ll be real with you, and this comes from a place of love:
no, buddy!!!
When people are familiar with a thing they like, they will engage with it more heavily than a thing they are not familiar with. Superman has a million stories, a million cultural contexts. Maybe I like the Fleischer cartoons and you really loved For The Man Who Has Everything or All-Star Superman or Action Comics 542 or whatever. The point is that people form an emotional attachment to Superman, because he’s been around for 87 years and has been in a lot of very popular, critically acclaimed work.
Further, you will note that a lot of this comes not from the Superman design or rendering, but the narrative and emotional context. The aesthetics are crucial, but if you’re out there drawing an OC (and if you’re trying to make money from your art, then selling it as an adoptable or selling merch based on your OC) and all you ever do is just draw the character a bunch with little things like “this is Jimmy. He had a tortured past” or “this is what Jimmy is like when ordering coffee,” these single images can be enjoyable, but they’re not going to get the rabid, frothing affection that Superman, with 87 years of storytelling (not just drawings, but drawings and storytelling — you need both for people to love a character) behind him gets.
So, hey, artists? Stop worrying about the reason your fanart does better than your original work. Especially those of you who are like “oh my god everyone hates me I should give up.” I dunno what happened to your self-confidence, but like… look at it like this:
If I announce two new games tomorrow, and one is a video game about “Batman trying to stop Superman, who has been possessed by Eclipso and is magically nullifying Superman’s weakness to kryptonite,” (the audience immediately understands that Superman and Batman are friends and Batman, with no powers, going up against Superman, with a lot of powers, is going to be an interesting hurdle to climb), and the other is a game about a character named Bobbi Guns and it’s about her quest to find the lost treasure of Razzmatazz, most people are going to be more interested in the thing they are already familiar with because they already know they like it.
Never-mind that Bobbi Guns and her grand adventure could actually be the better, more inventive, more original game by far, and people might actually love that game when it releases, perhaps even more than the Batman/Superman game.
It’s the same reason that when people make up their wishlists for game announcement shows, most of their speculation is on either remakes or sequels, because it is easier to imagine more of the thing you like than it is to imagine a thing you will love for the first time. No one sits there going “gosh, I hope at X05 Amsterdam that Bioware, a studio known primarily for fantasy and licensed RPGs, makes a wholly original sci-fi third person RPG series with a Syd Mead aesthetic,” but everyone gets excited for the possibility of a Mass Effect 2.
Also, shit’s expensive! That means when you’re picking which $80 video game to buy (don’t buy an $80 video game, seriously), you’re likely to go with the thing you are sure you will like (a sequel to a series you know) more than something you are not sure you’ll like.
Now imagine someone releasing a work and it just getting out into the wild, not protected by copyright, so it kind of loses its identity. Batman and Superman have been around for a long time, and they’ve been curated — you know what you’re getting with them. This new thing, without copyright, would never get a chance to stay around as its own thing before other people take it and make what they want.
So, copyright can work as a means of memetic maturation. A work is made, and then it is protected so that it doesn’t grow too fast, like a tree being pruned. Remember what we said about memes? They’re ideas that have life cycles? Well, a concept like Superman is a meme. It’s a concept-as-a-life-form, a semiotic marker.
If you let an idea out into the world and people get to immediately do stuff with it, it’s possible for the original meaning or purpose to be lost. With copyright, the idea gets to be defined for a set period of time, so, like concrete, it can set a little before other people get to mess with it. As it does, the idea gains some potency — the owners of the intellectual property get to spend time exploring what Superman and what he is and means — before their creation goes out into the world.
Copyright means you aren’t just protecting the creator’s livelihood, you’re also giving the creator enough time to set the tone for what their creation is. Given that art is so often personal, this step is crucial. Which brings us back to the many people I’ve met who mistakenly believe themselves to be leftists or anarchists because they argue that “information should be free.”
You ask them how that’s supposed to work, and they don’t have an answer. They simply have an ideal that “this shit shouldn’t cost money,” which is a great ideal to have (why should we have to break our backs to survive? that’s so dumb! we would thrive if we could spend time on things we want to do, rather than selling our time to a corporation in order to put food on the table) and no way of actually getting there. Being an idealist is great…
…but the reality is they’re not what they claim: they’re consumerists.
What they actually believe is that everyone should be able to get anything they want all the time. They believe their happiness comes from quick, cheap, and easy consumption.
What they want is a product to consume without restriction, and they want it immediately— it’s not about respecting the work or the people involved in creating it, it’s not about the well-being of the people making the work (which, if you truly cared about things like UBI, you would want, and you would understand that if you want to take something produced by another person, their well-being is of the utmost importance because you are both humans living together within society) it’s about taking something for themselves.
So while those same people will often say “I wish there was a world without capitalism so people could just focus on making art,” they will then argue that they should be able to do that regardless of whether or not the artist they’re taking from can make a living. Your wish didn’t come true yet! It’s still a world with capitalism! You can’t act as if capitalism doesn’t exist until you actually deal with it!
If someone does not care about the fellow laborer making the art they wish to consume — they only care about their own personal consumption — then no matter what lofty ideals they claim to have, they’re a consumer.
Without class solidarity, “information should be free” isn’t an ideal, it’s just consumerism.
Sometimes, people pirate my games. I don’t mind any more than I mind people reading my articles. I mean, again, I put these articles out for free so people who need them can read them, but I need several thousand dollars for my life to get back on track because a catastrophic series of medical emergencies and a totaled car really fucked shit up, in addition to my $320–640/month physical therapy costs that help me function at all. I make that money largely through your tips on article like this. So I just have to hope that enough of you like my articles enough to tip me. I’m not paywalling this, I’m not limiting access to the wealthy — I’m risking the fruits of my labor making absolutely nothing in the hopes that it might benefit someone other than me.
If enough people pirate my work, that becomes a problem. If someone draws fanart of Adios, that’s great. If someone starts drawing fanart of Adios and profiting off it, that might be an issue, because I would need to protect my rights. I think a level of sharing my work is acceptable, but if it gets shared too much, then I run the risk of being able to afford to do more of this work.
If you like my work enough to make fanart, then presumably you like enough to want me to make more of it, right? So even though it’s not perfectly enshrined in law, a lot of people accept that gamers will stream their games (technically, as I understand it, all game streaming is actually copyright violation and if the game developers wanted to, they could kill every youtuber and streamer you know tomorrow and be perfectly within their rights to do it — but letting people stream your work gets people talking about your work. we’ll talk more about this later) or do fanart or write fanfiction.
But some people want even the source material to be freely available. This evolved over the years, so when it comes to the topic of piracy, for instance, a lot of people argue something like this:
“If Sally walks into a bookstore and takes a copy of the book, she is harming the bookseller, who paid for a copy of that book, who paid for the shipping, who pays to keep the lights on in the store, and who pays the employee. The bookseller is harmed because the bookseller no longer has a copy of the book to sell.”
“If Sally goes to a website and downloads a free copy of the book, she is merely duplicating data. No one is being deprived of a physical copy of the book. They can still sell it, so no one is being harmed.”
Now, some people — like the lawyers at the RIAA — have pointed out that if someone can simply get for free what they would otherwise pay for, then those people are still depriving the people who deserve to make the money of their sale.
The RIAA then decided, based on this, to sue for more than Seventy Five Trillion Dollars in damages, which is more money than exists in the entire world, because they made a very stupid assumption, which is that every instance of downloading the media was inherently a lost sale.
Obviously, since the barrier to getting something is reduced, many people are opportunists — if I have $100 to spend this week on albums, I am only buying $100 worth of albums. If I have the ability to torrent a shitload of music at the click of a button, maybe I take more. I never would have purchased those albums, but if they were there for the taking, like a brochure at a museum that lists other nearby museums I might want to visit, I might grab it because the barrier is low.
That means that while copyright infringement can result in depriving a person of the fruits of their labor, it doesn’t guarantee that that’s what is happening.
That’s why I’m okay if some sixteen year old kid who’s trying to find a job pirates a copy of Adios, and why I wouldn’t be okay when a guy making $250,000 a speaking engagement pirates it. I think people should pay according to their ability, but I think people should be satisfied according to their needs.
;)
I can’t make more games if people aren’t buying my games, but some people wouldn’t have been able to pay me anyways, so I am personally not going to pursue every single person who failed to pay me $18 to buy a copy of Adios, you know?
Without any copyright protections, patents, IP protections, and so on, my ability to keep making cool shit is diminished because my ability to live is diminished. My income gives me the time I need to make the work I make. If I had to work a different job, given my severe untreated health issues, I would not be able to make art at all.
How’d this all come about?
In The Beginning…
So, for most of human existence, we’d go making things, and some people would be like “wow, that looks really cool,” and that was that. Michelangelo paints the Sistine Chapel, and people go “damn, that’s awesome. Wish I had that on a T-shirt,” but since they didn’t live in the age of mechanical reproduction, and since there were no bots trying to create t-shirts, they could not do this.
Michelangelo painted it, we all knew it was him, and that was that. If you wanted work like that, you’d go to him. His hard work paid off — people recognized what he’d done and he would get the compensation for his hard work.
The physical limitation of duplicating the work meant that a lot of artists — craftsmen who made things — were able to make a living producing art in exchange for pay. This pay is how these craftsmen were able to survive. They weren’t hunting or farming, they were making things in exchange for the things required to live. Could be a painter or sculptor making art for the church — no different than a worker helping build a cathedral — could be a musician playing random tunes at a pub somewhere, or a storyteller around the fire regaling travelers with tales to pass the time in exchange for a little coin.
Well, then a really bad famine and the Black Plague kinda occur back to back, and suddenly, the kings and rulers who were going around demanding that everybody give them grain so they could rule, which mostly meant, you know, demanding grain from people so they could live well while the rest of us live in poverty.
(there’s a fun story from the Kennedy family about how they didn’t realize the great depression was happening because they were so rich they just paid their way through it )
These were not capitalists, but the process was largely the same: one guy owns a whole lot of shit, and he expects you to work for him, and in exchange for him not killing you, you grow enough wheat or whatever on your farm and he takes like 70% of it so he can feed the men who will hurt you if you don’t give him your grain, and the rest he keeps for lavish feasts.
Well, this has always been historically unfair. The king does not labor, the king does not really do anything useful, the king serves more like a mascot and a god. People go “wow, yay, we have a king and our king is the best! he’s better than your king! also we have to give him a shitload of wheat or he’ll have men throw us in irons.”
I am simplifying this, of course, but you get the idea.
The idea of kings of any sort has always been silly, but the idea that anyone ought to make the king’s life easy while breaking their back to survive was entirely unsustainable. When enough people fuckin died, society could no longer function.
I read from someone once who was like “I’m BITING my TONGUE because FEUDALISM never EXISTED” but they locked their article behind a paywall, so I’m not sure what they were trying to talk about beyond “hey, feudalism never existed per se, but is a way of describing a ton of economic systems that had a lot of similarities throughout history,” which is like, okay, fine. Luckily for us, we’re speaking from 30,000 feet here, and we don’t need to get into the specifics of feudalist-style structures.
Now, the thing about feudalism and all the similar systems was that they usually happened in the absence of a strong central government. You see a bastardized version of this happen in a lot of fiction, like, say, The Witcher, where you’ve got this big fuckoff empire (Nilfgaard), and you’ve got smaller little kingdoms like Sodden. The feudal structures don’t exist quite so much where the empire is concerned, because the empire has infrastructure and minted coins and all sorts of other shit.
And then the rats came.
In the 14th century, a lot of people fuckin died thanks to The Black Plague and some other shit, which meant suddenly there were a lot fewer people to tend to the fields and fight in the armies and all that other shit. That made it… difficult to run a feudal system. Throw in some increasing technological modernity and the increasing centralization of governments, and something new happens.
Instead of “I live in a village and occasionally we build a house cause we all live on The King’s land and he owns it and we just kinda live our lives technically working for him cause he’s got men with violence willing to hurt us if we don’t,” society moves to… something a little more personal property focused.
Part of this is because, y’know, cities were getting a bit more livable (which meant people weren’t just growing shitloads of grain everywhere), and mercantilism (which is capitalism’s predecessor) was becoming a thing. You’d have a guy open up a shop and you’d go there and he’d sell you stuff, which was a bit nicer than having to make it yourself or hope somebody around you could do it.
So, even before mercantilism, Michelangelo paints and sculpts, people give him money, he gets to buy a house and pay for food and clothing, which are farmed and tailored by other people. Those people, in turn, use that money to pay for their own needs.
No one can do everything needed to survive — humanity is a collective, after all — so we rely on the people around us to do the things we can’t in exchange for the things we can. I make video games because I can do that, while my neighbor runs a print shop making signs for people. Both of us fill a need, and in exchange we get money to help us live.
Now, we are always seeking technology to make our jobs easier; a thousand years ago, for me to write these essays, I’d need to fight the pain of using my hands to hold a pencil. Now, I have a computer that autosaves things and lets me disseminate my essays with relative ease! I have a keyboard that lets me type hundreds of words a minute, and thanks to the internet, I can go look up cool articles like this one. Sometimes, the things I look up end up helping inform my writing.
That’s awesome. Technology that supports that shit is awesome.
But… not all technology is inherently good. The movable type printing press, for instance, meant that people could share their writing much more quickly than they could in the years prior. The costs went down too — you didn’t need to own (and feed and house) literate slaves, who were very expensive, in order to have them hand-write a bunch of books for you. Now, you could pay some guy in a shop to do it. So, hey, it reduced the demand for slaves, which is nice, and it got the costs down, which is sometimes good (except when people try to use AI to cost people jobs, which is not so good).
…just… one little problem: now that anyone could copy a book… people did. Which meant that a guy might write a book, and then someone would print it, and someone else would go “I would like to sell this book,” and then they’d start selling a copy. They might be able to undercut the original author, making money off work that was not theirs. The only labor they’d done was to copy someone else’s work.
If an author isn’t paid well enough to do what they do, they stop. The guy who copied him certainly isn’t talented enough to keep up copying him, so if the original author starves on the street, then bam, writing dries up. That’s bad.
You didn’t have to think about something like this when it came to, say, ‘making a wagon.’ You’d talk to a wagon-making guy about building a wagon, and he’d have a reputation as a fine wagon-maker, and then he’d make a wagon. The quality of work was in his own skill as a creator.
Now, with the invention of movable type, someone with no skill could simply take someone else’s work and profit off their labor, leaving the original creator penniless. Something had to be done; the creators needed to be protected so they couldn’t be stolen from, which would allow them to keep making cool shit.
When it comes to fiction, I put a lot of work into the R&D for a story. It requires time and planning. I have to research a lot of stuff! That takes effort and resources! If someone could immediately copy what I did and profit off it without any work, then I would not be able to continue going.
So very early on, people figured out that sometimes, something might exist but not actually possess physical form. A story can be copied infinitely into many different printings of a book, which means that the story itself needs some kind of rules in place to say “no, you can’t just copy that.”
We call this “intellectual property.” It might not be physical, but my story about a guy named Farmer telling a guy named Hitman he’s quitting the mob is a thing that I worked hard to make. Someone can’t just make digital copies of the files, sell it themselves, and make a profit.
Because of the money I made on Adios, I was able to get a second game made; if someone swooped in and stole my shit, it could significantly hamper my ability to pay not just the bills, but my employees!
Copyright is, then, a necessity. Without legal protections like copyright — but certainly not just limited to that — my ability to continue making great work, selling that work, and being able to continue doing that, as well as the livelihoods of my five other employees, would be in jeopardy.
We see copyright, or ideas like copyright (such as Protected Designation of Origin), throughout society as a way to protect creators.
Ever wonder why there are so many spam recipe websites? Simple: according to my pal Don, who is an expert in this particular field, it turns out recipes aren’t protected by copyright. That means you get two very big problems:
First, without copyright protections, anyone can simply copy a recipe from anywhere else, write a stupidly-long SEO-optimized slop post about how they made a recipe, and if you scroll all the way to the end, you might actually find a recipe they got from someone else.
Second, someone big can come along and just take the recipe. The recipe seller has no real way to make money outside of, well, you guessed it: they make money from ads, which means… yeah, they have to create a bunch of stupidly-long SEO-optimized slop.
As the rate of production increases and the cost of production goes down, people will always look for the cheapest version of that thing in order to make the most money. In order to limit the generation of excess slop — whether that’s disinformation, SEO optimized nonsense, or AI generated images that devalue a work so much it can no longer make a profit (why would I buy a comic from DC or any Superman merch when I can just have an AI make it for me?) — mechanisms like copyright exist in a way that prevents too much shit from getting made too fast.
Some of you may say “ah, but in a utopian world where everyone has the ability to simply make art whenever they want, people could make art free from capitalist constraints.”
It’s a nice idea, but throughout history, humans have made art for fun (when you doodle in a notebook or write fanfiction), and humans have made art to pay the bills (whether that’s Michelangelo or Siegel & Shuster). And, as long as we live in a world where humans must labor in order to survive, those laborers must be protected. If you have the leisure time to make art as you’d like, that’s wonderful. Seriously, it is! But many of us have to do it as our day job too, and while that art is just as fulfilling and just as human and just as personal, it must also be protected so that we can, you know, buy groceries.
Remember Chesterton’s fence? You gotta know why a thing is there before you remove it. In this case, copyright protections mean that people are able to afford to make art, rather than other people sitting on the sidelines, waiting to let the original creator shoulder the cost of creation, while they just vacuum up the hard work and outcompete, like parasites.
Take our hypothetical credit-stealing con man from earlier. Let’s say we’re working together, and I pitch a game idea to him, like, say, a satire on capitalism where you use human body parts as currency. Let’s say that unbeknownst to me, and in violation of our contract together, this individual takes the pitch, changes it, and pitches it as his own idea.
Now, in a situation like this, it’s going to come down to reputation and power. Despite my online presence, I can’t afford (because of the aforementioned disability expenses) to go around to cons, ingratiate myself with publishers and other professionals, and build a presence.
But let’s say this guy is able bodied, and he’s willing to make use of his greater finances and the popularity he’s already got. Since he knows most people aren’t aware of me, maybe he goes around telling people about this great new idea he’s got, which is a satire on capitalism that uses human body parts as currency. He’s affable, agreeable, and willing to mirror you, like ChatGPT does, so it’s easy to find him likable.
Maybe, if people start asking around about me, he comes up with some reasons why you definitely shouldn’t pay attention to me — and, because of the position he enjoys socially, thanks to all the connections he has and influence he’s amassed through his vacuous flattery — you’re willing to believe him.
Think about how easy it would be for someone who already has social credibility to get in the way and deprive disabled people like me of our ability to function. They could do serious, significant damage just because they’re afraid of people finding out how much they stole from other creators, and they can use their relatively powerful position to do just that, feeling secure in their belief that they can leverage their money, reputation, and power to crush anyone who might go “hey, you stole it from me!”
Sometimes it works out for them, if they have enough money; a big company can copy something a smaller independent creator did and sell it as their own work, and without copyright protections, the bigger and more powerful someone is, the easier it is for them to harm the actual creators. Remember when Aaron Carter tried to steal artists’ designs and sell them as his own? He wasn’t the one making it, he was just trying to profit off their work, making it more difficult for them to make work in the future.
So, if you don’t know anything about copyright, you might be thinking “wow, copyright sounds really awesome!”
Sure, throughout history, people have needed to work to live, because things don’t come into unless someone makes those things. Unfortunately, because human beings are alive and need to consume fuel and be safe from the elements in order to make things, and obtaining and consuming fuel and paying for shelter and making things all takes time, people have to balance their needs.
If someone can make money from the thing they are making, then they are able to spend time on continuing to make that thing, and the money can be used to pay for other people’s time in order to get shelter and food.
Because I can sell my art, I can use the money I earn to pay a farmer for her time growing peas that I can put on my food. She can use that money to buy art from another artist, who buys food from another farmer, who buys art from me, and the cycle continues. All of us benefit.
But… there’s a problem: people own so much property that they just get money because they’re the owner of the thing, who use their power and money to exploit other people for their time, labor, or intellectual property.
We call that capitalism.
A Few Problems With Capitalism
Some of you may have seen this video, “A Fair(y) Use Tale.”
It was actually one of the first things that helped me understand a lot of the issues with copyright, and the way it is able to use copyrighted material to make an educational point is a good one.
All of Disney’s major stories are based on work other people created. What Disney has copyrighted is largely their specific implementation of that work. They have the money and legal power to bully you if you use elements that are even remotely similar to what they’ve done, which can make it a challenge for some people, trying to recreate those public domain (out of copyright, meaning it’s owned by society at large, rather than an individual copyright holder) stories. Disney attempts to remove ideas from the public domain in this fashion; they do not put in the work of creating an idea, because it’s already been done.
(in fact, the reason they’re doing ‘live action’ remakes is to replace the existing works so they don’t even have to pay the original artists who worked for them royalties — they also did this when buying Fox, acting as if they did not have to pay Alan Dean Foster royalties that he was owed for the work he’d done because they only bought the IP, not the liabilities, which was horse shit)
Without copyright, Disney would take… well, anything. Imagine a world where ND Stevenson creates Nimona, and Disney goes “yeah, hey, we are gonna make a movie out of that.” So, like the hypothetical credit-stealing sociopath, Disney gets to leverage their relative power within the industry to go “look at us, we made it,” sometimes to the point of weaponizing their own fans against people.
Ever watched a fan of someone who stole work from someone else get extremely mad at the original creator for daring to ask for equal treatment? Disney adults do this kind of thing all the time, in part because they love how Disney is all about happiness and positive vibes and they feel so good in the presence of Disney how dare someone make them feel even the tiniest bit bad knowing the work was tainted!
So, let’s say we removed copyright entirely. A big corporation could just swoop in, use their marketing power and finances to crush the original creator, and convince everyone they’d created it. Oh, sure, some people might know who the original creator is, but when the thief is going around giving talks and getting press interviews fawning over how great they are, the original creator is deprived of their ability to create more.
Society withers and suffers because the person who ‘owns’ the idea culturally, even if not legally, doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing with the property, and the original creator can’t create.
In fact, this is something food companies do all the time with recipes, which, like we said, aren’t copyrightable. It’s harder to make stuff on your own when someone with more reach than you can take it from you, and just being the first to have an idea won’t actually do anything.
“Wait, Doc, this sounds like an argument in support of copyright, not against it.”
Well, that’s where capitalism comes in. You see, corporations like Disney have pushed copyright so hard that it can take over one hundred years for copyright to expire in the United States.
Capitalism is, in a very very simple nutshell, the idea that some people own something — like, say, an intellectual property or a factory — and they rely on the labor of other people, like you or me, to actually make money.
A long time ago, a guy pitched a plan to me at Mischief. He wanted to make more money, and he saw my discussion of ethical game development (I had been crunched so badly on a project that I had been hospitalized, and he had offered to help me escape an abusive situation) as a really good marketing beat. I’d say “let’s develop games ethically” and he’d be saying “yeah, that’s good, people will like that. We can give talks about it.” Stuff like that.
His idea was simple: we’d keep ourselves in the news cycle by constantly releasing games — which he referred to as “revenue streams” based on all these ideas I was coming up with at Mischief.
I pointed out that it wasn’t a sustainable business model and certainly not one we could afford, but he had a solution: to avoid the costs of having employees, “like royalties or benefits,” only the owners would make money. Everyone else would be a contractor, paid up front so we could get the most work out of them by going “well, we already paid you.” And, if we really had to, we could maybe pay them to do a bit more work, or keep the game as small and low quality as possible to get a high volume of games out in order to stay ‘relevant’ in the news cycle.
Quantity was his goal, not quality, which I took issue with. He didn’t seem to think it mattered, since “you can just tell people it’s quality and they’ll believe you.”
Part of the reason he wanted to do this was because, as I pointed out to him, “but you can’t make a game by yourself.” His response was that contractors could make up for the gaps in our respective skill sets. Keep ’em nice and cheap.
In hindsight, I think that’s why, he told me a person I wanted to hire for $40/hr was “unhireable,” and then after I reluctantly accepted his judgement, I found out that he went off and tried to hire this person for far less. He didn’t think she was unhireable, he just didn’t want her realizing she was worth at least $40/hr (and if I could’ve paid more, I would’ve).
So, in his mind, we’d own the idea, we’d pay people for their labor, make all the money ourselves, and just constantly churn through contractors. We’d frame it as being job creators giving people opportunities, so nobody would call us exploitative… but I mean, come on, dude, you’ve just reinvented Wal-Mart.
That’s a capitalist exploitation in a nutshell.
The capitalist wants to own the intellectual property, then exploit it — and the workers who make it — in order to make the most amount of money for the least amount of effort. They’ll frame it as smart (look at all the DOGE guys talking about how efficient they’re making the government by deleting cancer research) or ethical because they’re reducing “waste,” but the waste they’re cutting is almost always “a livable wage for the workers.”
Sometimes an abuser like this has an idea and they pay other people to make it, screaming at them “no no no, like this!” and constantly changing their ideas at the last second because their idea was too vague to matter, and their lack of skill in the discipline was too miniscule to do a good job.
You ever worked for a “creative” at a company who gives you a vague idea, and you, an expert in the area, works hard to make something, and then the “creative” played a game that weekend and comes back and goes “change everything”? People like this exist all over creative industries — it’s why so many games are mismanaged to hell and why Disney execs forced so many reshoots because of their obsessive need for pixel-fucking!
I’ve been given some wild notes in my career — like “I love it, it’s weird, like Twin Peaks, but can you make it less weird?” and I’ve heard plenty of horror stories from other creatives. We’re just trying to make cool shit and make a living doing it, and you’ve got execs saying things like “I don’t understand why this object is bigger than that object,” and someone literally has to explain the idea of objects that are close to you being larger than objects that are further away. This actually happened to Phil, my assistant director on our current project, when he worked in animation.
…multiple times.
(also one time they called him a direct threat to middle america because he wrote an episode of a show that featured a tornado made out of pies, as if midwesterners don’t stand out on our porch looking at a tornado like “yup, that’s a tornado.” he solved this problem by making the tornado 10% smaller in the storyboards)
Other times, capitalists desperate for attention and credit, take their ideas from from other people. Maybe they make videos betraying their lack of understanding of how copyright works, going “you can steal ideas and no one can stop you!” Or they argue that because they had (or stole) a vague idea and paid someone else to make it into something workable, that makes them the sole creator of the work and the person who deserves all the accolades.
If they get enough power and can pay well, or if there’s no other game in town, they can capture enough talent to keep stealing from people. It’s not like it’s easy to start a 2D animation studio to make movies, you know? Sprinkle in a little anticompetitive practices, try to convince people your way is the best and good and other people are wrong or even evil, and you got a stew for cultural capture going.
Remember when Martin Scorsese was asked if he’d direct a Marvel film, and he said “that’s not really the kind of movie I like” and suddenly legions of astroturfed accounts were showing up trying to decry Scorsese as a filmmaker because he’d failed to kiss Disney’s proverbial ring? Sociopaths hate it when you tell them no, and people who try to intentionally exploit workers for labor are so often actually sociopaths.
I’ve seen this happen on all sorts of scales. I used to know this guy once who convinced a lot of people he was very trustworthy, because he’d hint that he’d heard bad things about other people in the industry, so he was really plugged into the grapevine and had all sorts of connections, apparently.
As it turned out, he was actually talking shit about people who had either criticized him (for, say, substandard work) or who he viewed as competitors. He tried to go “other people trust me with this information, so I’m In The Know, and you can trust me,” but he was actually just lying about other people for his own benefit.
The capitalist knows all he has is the property he owns, so he’ll do anything he can — lying about competition, stifling it, exploiting workers, even trying to get people blacklisted if they’re competitors (like how Elon Musk and friends have been trying to make sure Rivian, a competitor, cannot get access to the same funds that Elon Musk’s company Tesla does).
A capitalist cannot compete on innovation, on ideas, or anything, because the people who actually do the labor — the actual artists — are the ones who created the intellectual property, so they have to cheat. Sometimes they do it with contracts that say “any idea you come up with belongs to us,” other times it’s by trying to bully people with non-competes, other times they simply buy up all the competition (hello, Autodesk).
Maybe they use their platform power to make money on other people’s work through other means, like Apple trying to force everyone to use their payment processing, which was costing creators like me a ton. I lost almost $300 in Patreon extra fees overnight, despite a slight growth of supporters last month, for instance. Luckily for us, a court just told them to fuck off.
…and one of the ways capitalists cheat is by attempting to leverage copyright, both by extending it to ludicrous lengths, far beyond what’s actually optimal, which is 14 years, not 120 from the point of conception if done as work-for-hire.
A capitalist can pay someone to create a story for them, and then that actual creator, the person who made the work matter, might suffer and be struggling because they are not being paid well.
At Mischief, when someone needs time off, we give it to them; we don’t make it unpaid. If, twenty years down the line, we have enough money, and an old employee of ours needs medical help like Peter David, I’d do everything in my power to make sure Mischief covers all of his bills.
Heck, I’ve actually been trying to figure out what Hollywood-style royalties might look like in the games industry because I want to create a new kind of financial system in games. I think developers deserve royalties from the games we make, not just temporary bonuses. Why should Andrew Wilson make $26 million dollars when most of his developers aren’t making shit in comparison? What does he do that is actually worth way more than, say, the directors directing the games that actually make EA the money?
When I was consulting on games the last gen, I saw the NPDs for games. While Call of Duty Ghosts was the #1 title, not far behind was Dragon Age: Inquisition. So why is it that EA leadership focused on massive boondoggle Anthem instead of their actual moneymaker? Why did they fail to support the team that was actually making the money? Can people like Andrew Wilson be trusted to run EA if they can’t even facilitate the people who actually bring in the money to do their jobs?
But, hey, that’s businessmen in a nutshell.
There’s an author I mentioned before, James C. Scott, who talked about how European farmers went to Africa, ignored the advice of farmers who lived there, and tried to make nice, orderly farms with all the plants growing on a grid. They thought this was scientifically accurate farming. The farms all failed, because wouldn’t you know it, you can’t just expect the Earth to do what you expect. Instead of listening to the people who actually knew the task (the laborers), they thought “we know better. We can make this smart.”
Businessmen often work the same way. Do you really think a guy who’s got an MBA or a JD knows anything about storytelling? Why should David Zaslav be the one telling his employees how to make movies when he’s got no experience doing that? Sure, you hire a guy like that for things like “making sure the studio is following the law,” and “ensuring that payroll is going out,” but why in the fuck would you want a guy who doesn’t know shit about entertainment or what people want to make decisions concerning the art?
I don’t go in and tell my programmers how to program, because when I became disabled, I lost my ability to read, write, and program without significant effort. I got reading and writing back, but programming? Shit’s gone, man. I trust my programmers to do what needs to be done. I design the game, I structure it, walk them through the UX flow, work out things like character classes and combat dynamics and stuff, but I can’t program anymore, so I trust them.
But capitalists, who have nothing but ownership, are deeply insecure. The entire business class is either too busy just playing games (the other day, someone told me that some major business and investment types literally use astrologers to tell them what to do) with the stock market rather than making anything real, or adding nothing of value to the companies they run.
In fact, I wasn’t able to find it in the lead-up to this essay, but I ran across a scientific study showing that having a business degree doesn’t actually make a business run better. At best, it has no impact on a company, and is more often to actually make things worse.
Because of this, they get resentful. They say “hey, listen, we don’t need experts. We’re Business Guys. We own the company. We know best.” And they fire the guys who actually know what they’re doing, and planes start falling out of the air.
I get it; if you want to run a company, having someone who knows how to keep you in legal compliance with government regulations is a good guy. But time and time again, we see that when people make the products they want, rather than just imitating what’s on the market, they make way more successful products.
Nobody wants another Fortnite, but the Clair Obscur guys made a fuckload of money making a turn-based JRPG, which all the biz guys insisted nobody actually wanted. Maybe the people who know the actual discipline know more than know-nothing biz guys? Just a thought.
So, imagine being one of these soulless ghouls who just wants to exploit workers and acts like ‘paying someone to do a thing’ makes them the inventor of a thing, the way Elon Musk frames himself as an inventor even though he bought his way into Tesla. As I recall, he was pals with a higher-up in Obama’s NASA administration, which was what got SpaceX the sweet deal that kept SpaceX functioning.
Imagine that you create nothing, you just pay other people to do it, and you know they know they’re smarter than you. Maybe, like Thomas Edison, you try to run Nicola Tesla out of business or insist no one can shoot movies unless they’re using cameras you made so they can’t compete with you.
You know what would be the dream?
A robot that does whatever it’s told.
Copyright Is Saving Us From AI
So, here we are: capitalists own things and want to make money on ownership without doing any labor, similar to how a company that distributes software wants a 30% cut without actually doing anything, or how a landlord doesn’t want to replace your dying air conditioner but wants to jack rent up every year. They want to contribute nothing and take everything.
They don’t want employees who can do work they can’t, because then those employees have leverage. Look at how Silicon Valley started attacking work from home because the workers started going “yeah, we don’t… actually need to be commuting two hours to and from the office every day? And we definitely don’t need a bunch of useless micromanagers to interrupt us while we’re doing our jobs.”
So, instead of going “well, happy and healthy employees make the best products, Silicon Valley went “despite the data showing work from home is a definite net good,” it went “NO! I MUST STAY IN CONTROL OR YOU’LL REALIZE ALL I HAVE IS OWNERSHIP OF THE COMPANY AND NOTHING TO ADD!”
Now, someone who owns property resents the idea that they can’t exist without other people. When someone wants everyone to think he’s a big genius in video games, he might offer lip service to “it’s a team effort,” but then you look at all the glowing profiles of his company, and you see “Mister Butts = Delightful Developments!” or whatever.
The other team members might get mentioned, but it’s the sociopathic capitalist who wants all the attention, so you assume his studio, Delightful Developments is, well, entirely him, despite the lip service to the other team members, because they aren’t out there giving the interviews or getting credit for being the primary creators.
That lip service creates plausible deniability — Mister Butts can say “but look! I said this one mechanic came from this one team member!” all he wants, but he’s deliberately creating an environment where he is the Creator Director Owner Genius when all he’s really done is ship a lot of games based on the work of his employees or past collaborators and taken all the acclaim for it.
Imagine a guy like this completely fictitious Mr. Butts being confronted with his workers wanting to unionize. If he’s following the “well, actually, everyone’s just a contractor model” like certain people in video games or Doordash, he might try to fire them all, like Valnet just did during the middle of Polygon’s union negotiations. He’d definitely resent them — after all, the goal is to make him Famous and High Profile and Seen As A Genius (Elon Musk is a great example of this type of person, and he’s notably anti-union).
Sure, he’ll tell you “well, it’s ethical that I only have contractors” in one sentence, maybe saying something like “I didn’t want to make a company where people couldn’t feed their families” with one line, followed by “working for me is their side gig” (hmm, how’s that work, buddy?), and “well, I get all the money, but that also means the risk lies with me cause I might lose way more money than the people I’m underpaying.”
Same kind of person who tells you “it’s not crunch if you’re having fun!”
These fuckers hate the idea that workers like you or I could be protected. They want to own everything, be credited for everything, be seen as brilliant geniuses… for simply owning the business, nothing more.
So then some guy named Sam Altman comes to them and says “hey, I’ve got this machine. It sorts a bunch of words and numbers to make it seem like it’s outputting real human speech or images. I can use it to replace your workers!”
This is the “AI” most people talk about these days.
Well, a lot of fellas like that might like the idea. Some of them might even talk about how AI is the future, we just have to accept it, it makes our work better, and so on (even though we know it doesn’t). They think customers are simply robots who buy whatever is fed to them, so if they can generate work even faster, whether that’s by overworking employees or releasing small, unmemorable, low quality games, or telling people “this is quality” in the marketing material when it isn’t, that people will just buy it.
Other executives believe that people love a property and that love for the property will never change, so they shit out five hundred copies of the extremely good-selling thing they had, and find that lo and behold, people get stuffed! And maybe they wanna try something else for a change!
This is difficult for an executive to understand. They think “if I just keep stuffing people full of The Brand, which is popular now, it will be popular forever.” Maybe they’re addicted to the hype and release cycle, or afraid if they’re out of the spotlight for long, people won’t care about them. Maybe they just look at the charts and think “this will be popular forever.”
So, these capitalists, resentful of their workers and desperate for acclaim though they have nothing — literally nothing — to justify their existence other than “ownership,” doing everything they can to fight competition and regulation so they can make the numbers on the chart go up even though most of them don’t actually understand why the numbers go up — they want someone who says “yes boss, right away boss,” and does what they want. No questions, no pushback, nobody to appear smarter than them.
They surround themselves with idiots, and what is more idiotic than a machine that makes human-sounding sentences but cannot think?
…there’s a problem. For AI to exist, it has to have someone insert a million different images or words into it. Then the computer processes those things. That’s where it gets the ability to average things out from. If Sam Altman uploads “Superman” images to his computer, and every image tagged “Superman” has the iconic S-Shield of Superman, when you say “give me an image of Superman,” it will give you an image that approximates Superman.
Warner Brothers, which owns Superman, does not see a red cent. When someone on Deviantart sells Superman as an adoptable, they make money on a thing Warner Brothers owns.
Now, hey, it’s Warner Brothers, a company that, alongside Disney, has fucked up copyright really bad. But they’re not fighting it because they also want to have Sam Altman’s software generate “Superman” for them, without humans to say “no.” Never mind it’s incredibly inefficient and costly — execs are the kind of people who say they’re cutting waste and then order so many reshoots that a movie that should cost $90 million costs $1.4 billion (also, I’m sure if the federal government were to do some investigating, they’d turn up a lot of embezzlement, but that’s neither here nor there).
To the executive, even if it’s kinda violating their copyright, it’s a dream come true, because — they hope — they’ll be free of their workers, especially the ones who might want, as the guy I mentioned earlier, “royalties and benefits.” They can move to non-unionized classes of labor, have a permacontractor model, force people to crunch or be blacklisted in the industry, and finally, nobody will tell them no, and since a computer made it, well, gosh, it’s like they made it themselves!
While the executives are trying to use AI to get rid of workers so they can tell their shareholders their cost is down but their sales are up. There’s an obvious problem here: if the workers aren’t making money, then who is going to give them sales? Where do the customers come from if they’re replaced by AI?
But that’s not all: David Zaslav might not be saying “uh, OpenAI, you need to delete your ChatGPT image training and start over from scratch since you were not authorized to use my material to train your machine, because it’s outputting copyrighted material that could compete with ,” but other people have been, because… well, what is copyright for?
Copyright is for protecting someone’s ability to make a living on what they’ve created by granting them exclusive rights to profit from that thing for a set period of time.
And if you can copy what someone has made and make it yourself, you’re competing with them. If you have enough resources, you can take something in development and try to beat the person to market, even. Being a parasite who steals from others adds nothing of value to the world; it’s not innovative. The people who innovate and drive culture need to be protected so they can keep doing that.
If I make Adios merch, and then a big T-shirt company makes Adios merch, they could theoretically eat into my sales, which I need to keep making Adios. Copyright protects me from them. Remember, the cost of information dissemination is going down all the time — and, paradoxically, because AI is wrong most of the time, it’s also removed the value of information Brand talked about because it’s rendered it valueless, just empty calories for the brain, sound and fury that signifies nothing — and AI makes that even cheaper.
If you make a machine that can steal from other people and outcompete with them because it takes a human a few days to draw a picture and a computer can shit one out in sixty seconds, then you put that person out of a job.
And then Sam Altman says his entire business model can’t exist unless he breaks the law. Facebook stole books so it wouldn’t have to pay, and then told the authors their books were worthless.
If Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg’s businesses cannot function without theft, then why in the fuck would we allow those businesses to exist? If Sam came to your house and took your PlayStation and said “well, I’m starting up a pawn shop,” well, you’d be pretty pissed. If a guy stole a lot of your intellectual property and sold it as if it belonged to him, you might understandably want your work back, and most people would agree his company, based on stolen work, shouldn’t exist at all. A court might feel the same way.
Copyright is the only thing keeping these guys at bay. It’s a good thing that work created by a machine can’t be copyrighted (because copyright is intended to make sure people can survive — it doesn’t matter whether or not a sorting machine can make a living, it doesn’t need to eat or provide for a family or be happy) in the United States. It is crucial that big billionaire dudes with tons of resources can’t simply steal our work, create a machine that can crank out shoddy simulacra of our work, and then replace us on store shelves because it’s cheaper.
Once again: if you don’t have a job, how are you gonna buy their product? The execs want a world of customers but no laborers, which is entirely impossible unless, somehow, you make Universal Basic Income first.
When I was developing my pitch for a game about human body parts being used for capital, the idea I had hoped to explore was that the corporation wanted more customers, endlessly, but didn’t care about human lives. So sometimes you’d be killing people to get more body parts for the economy, but because you’d do that, you’d run out of customers. You’d have an empty world where capitalism ate itself because it needed to grow infinitely and chewed up its own laborers and customers in the process.
There was no one left.
The game, Hyper Violent City Builder, was a satire; it had a point, a discrete reason for being. When that internal pitch was stolen and turned into something cheap that only kept the surface elements, it lost that, in the same way that an AI generated work just feels kind of empty and meaningless. Sure, on the surface, it’s the same idea, but when a guy’s just stealing your shit because the point isn’t the work, but how he is perceived for coming up with a unique idea, well, it leads to a lot of reviews going “I don’t really get it, but the guy’s pretty cool, right?”
AI generated work and plagiarized work has no meaning. It has no value. Some of the acolytes of AI system think they’re being clever — “don’t say AI is plagiarism, no one cares (because I steal from people all the time!). Instead, say it looks bad (because eventually the tech will improve to the point where it looks good)!”
It’s a way of trying to shift the needle — plagiarism is a serious, actual issue, and depriving people of their income so you can steal from them and take the acclaim for yourself is the goal for people like this. They can’t make things on their own, so, like any capitalist, they’ll try to lie, cheat, and swindle, and convince you to accept that AI could be good one day and that plagiarism doesn’t actually matter.
From Zuckerberg to Altman to everyone else, it’s all about branding. And that shit? It never lasts.
Is There A Better Future?
Earlier in this essay, I planted a seed. I planted several, actually. I mentioned Superman a lot. Superman’s a copyrighted concept, but here I am, talking about him a lot. I’m doing that because I’m not making a piece of Superman media to compete with DC Comics; I am, instead, using Superman as a common cultural point to get an idea across.
If I had to make up a fictional character, it’s likely the idea wouldn’t stick in your head as much. When I say “superman’s S-Shield,” you know what I’m talking about — it’s the big dang S-Symbol on his chest.
A meme is an idea that is transmitted, mutating and responding to forces over time. It’s an idea with a life, a sort of conceptual life form. Superman is, in this sense, a meme, and we use the semiotics of Superman (the symbols and iconography that everyone understands to relate to Superman) as a way to have a discussion.
This is how human brains work; you can’t legislate away someone’s ability to live an experience, ingest it into their brain, and have a sense of feelings and thought sand memories about it through the power of the law.
Copyright, at best, prevents people from harming creators by making a competing product and leveraging their power, whether it’s financial or cultural, for prestige. When I talk about Superman, I am contributing to the cultural consciousness of DC Comics as an educator, but I’m not competing with its parent company Warner Bros. Superman-as-an-aspect-of-culture is a helpful educational tool that does no harm to WB or DC.
In fact, George Lucas recognized this with Star Wars and allowed people to do tons of fan work based on Star Wars. This permissiveness functioned as marketing, meaning that people could dress up like Star Wars characters or write fan fiction or whatever without Lucas going “no, stop, I don’t like that,” even if he had the right to do so.
Letting people talk about your work while maintaining copyright control means you get to steer the ship while other people help it spread. If lots of people are streaming my game, maybe other people will think about playing it, right? That’s what George Lucas understood.
It is beneficial to you, as a rights holder, to allow your work to become part of popular culture — to grow — even if you should also be fairly compensated for your work, so you have the basis to continue making more work, adding to culture rather than allowing it to become stagnant until people get bored (and there’s not an IP in the universe that people won’t get bored of eventually — at best, you’ll occasionally need to let it rest a bit so people can go “you remember Superman? I haven’t seen a Superman comic in a while. Yeah, I’ll check out a new Superman story…”).
Another seed I planted was the idea that The Thing You Know is easier to envision than The Thing You Don’t Know.
Now, some people — by which I mean stupid business executives — take this excitement for what exists as opposed to what does not exist — so mean that people only want sequels. This is a severe overcorrection and a misunderstanding of copyright’s ideal function.
What they want is to maintain an iron grip on a property. They see it as buying a house and renting it out forever; they don’t want the house to eventually, say, return to state control, or be told they have to do rent control. They want maximum profit for minimal work. To them, ideas are something that should always have value forever, no matter what. Squeeze blood from a stone.
I think that copyright is deeply flawed; I think there’s a lot that can be done to change it, starting by reducing the overall term. I think if we were to get Universal Basic Income operating on a global level, a lot more people would be able to make successful art, and I think that the people who own the capital don’t want that.
A guy who takes ideas from other people and pays contractors so little that they can’t even work for him as their main job can’t survive in a world where people no longer need him; it’s in his selfish interests to lie to people about their own worth, or to make them feeling that by being associated with him, he’ll build up their career one day.
A guy like that said the same to me. “Oh, well, I’m getting the game I took from you into this high profile magazine as a test run to see how to get your game into magazines, you see.” Never happened. When, after months of minimal work, we asked him if he felt he deserved a job with us, his response was “of course I deserve full time pay. I’m a value add. I bring in the money.” Even that wasn’t true.
People like that are parasitic; they might talk a big game, but they’re not treating you right. They resent you, your creative power. Copyright protects you from people like that, but some of them have figured out how to weaponize it for their own aims. The system’s a mess, and it needs a lot of work.
But AI? AI’s great for guys like that — not all of them, of course. Some are aware of the social costs, but they’ll steal from people the same way AI does, hoping you’re not looking.
I’m a creator. I make art that means a lot to me; I have to fall in love with it before I can start making it, you know? Otherwise, there’s no point. When I see plagiarists and AI users take work like mine and use it to exploit workers, it hurts. I mean it really hurts. When they use my own work to try to compete with me, it makes my life worse.
I’m over here struggling — I’m disabled — and I’m barely getting by. When people tip me for these articles, it’s a major relief. I nearly burst out in tears after my last tip, because it helped reduce a significant stressor.
I make cool, awesome shit, and I make cool, awesome shit with real people. The shit we make matters. We put our actual heart and soul into it, and a person who’s just copying the surface elements will never make something that meaningful.
No one really remembers most AI art they see — it fades from memory all too quickly. Few people remember the ripoffs either, because the ripoff is the surface, not the substance.
So, one day, I’d like to release my work to the public domain. I’d like to hit that level of maximum social utility. For now, I try to pay my workers well, understanding that it’s the workers bringing their skill and humanity to our games that make them what they are, that make them resonate.
Adios was about leaving something I loved behind — something I’d worked very hard on — because I didn’t want to help bad people use my work for bad reasons. At the time, I was afraid that without them, I’d be nothing, just like they told me. I was afraid I might die.
So, in the end, Farmer dies, because I needed to stick to my decision no matter what, even if it meant dying, so I had to work through it.
Other people got different things out of the game. Some chose to go on living. Others reunited with friends and family. Others were able to process grief.
My work did that because the feelings I felt were real, because I’m a human who wrote that thing.
I still need help. Fuck, I need help. My kitchen light fixture’s been busted for over a year and my landlord won’t fix it. My doctor’s visits have gotten up to over $300, and I can’t afford the Ozempic to treat my diabetes. It’s a struggle.
For some people, it’s so tempting to go “well what if I used AI.” For me, it’s tempting to go “what if I paywalled this shit? Would that help?” sometimes?
For the plagiarists, who gives a shit? I can’t respect a person who doesn’t respect themselves enough to make interesting art, even if they think they’re succeeding. So why would I care about them, you know?
But, listen, to a couple people in the industry: the people close to you have been talking. My advice would be to make amends and ask for forgiveness from those people before it’s too late. Treat them better than you treated me.
What’s the point of being an artist if you don’t make things for people around you? God, yeah, I’d love it if the tips on this piece made $10,000! I would, you know? I could pay off the medical bills, know I’ve got a few months of car payments taken care of, cut down on my stress. And man, I am so, so, so lucky that I can put this work out for free and people are kind enough to support not just me, but the people who can’t afford a paywall. Luckily, someone can’t just copy what I’ve done and make a book out of that, but with AI, they sure are trying.
It’s not perfect, and it’s often stressful, but I couldn’t live like a soulless ghoul, profiting off the labor of others. I want people to look at my art and see me in it, rather than generating plagiarized AI slop that means nothing.
I want to speak from the heart, and I hope it reaches you.
Sorry, but I gotta rattle the tip jar: Hey, I could use some help with medical bills and groceries. If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.
I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.
I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.
So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.
paypal.me/stompsite
ko-fi.com/stompsite
@forgetamnesia on venmo
$docseuss on cashapp
also, just because it’s cool, here’s a great piece on how AI works
