Category: Other Page 58 of 182

Grimes (aka Claire Boucher – and yes, we are related) made a splash recently by declaring “copyright sucks” and insisting that she was in favor of “killing” it. Do her claims hold water?

Stereogum’s re-reporting will suffice for our present purposes:

“I feel strongly that there’s way too much gatekeeping in music,” said Grimes. “Copyright sucks. Art is a conversation with everyone that’s come before us. Intertwining it with the ego is a modern concept. The music industry has been defined by lawyers, and that strangles creativity.”

“I think everything about copyright is problematic,” she added. “There’s too much top down control.”

I’m on the one hand sort of supportive of alternative exercises but on the other hand, not sure I completely buy what she’s offering as being an alternative at all…

I’m not just cherry-picking either; reporting continues:

After her keynote, Grimes launched a service called GrimesA1-1 Voiceprint to give AI creators access to her vocals. For $9.99/year, the service will put your song on streaming services.

So… she’s basically building a system of… wait for it… licensing… and:

Grimes also said she would “split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice,” adding: “Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings.”

So licensing + payments… that all sounds a little… idk copyright-esque to me?

I don’t want to go off on a huge tangent here either, but as an artist this all feels slightly… imperialistic, especially since she is also cited as saying that intertwining art with ego is a “modern concept.” All while generously offering to take your voice… and turn it into her voice, all for a low low fee. So we’re totally free to emulate her in every way, so long as she gets paid. Color me skeptical of the sincerity of all this, sorry.

And for someone who thinks there is a lot of gate-keeping and top down control in the music biz, and who hates copyright, she seems to… promote all of those things here with her further stipulations for acceptable use:

Ok hate this part but we may do copyright takedowns ONLY for rly rly toxic lyrics w grimes voice: imo you’d rly have to push it for me to wanna take smthn down but I guess plz don’t be *the worst*. as in, try not to exit the current Overton window of lyrical content w regards to sex/violence. Like no baby murder songs plz.

I think I’m Streisand effecting this now but I don’t wanna have to issue a takedown and be a hypocrite later. ***That’s the only rule. Rly don’t like to do a rule but don’t wanna be responsible for a Nazi anthem unless it’s somehow in jest a la producers I guess.
– wud prefer avoiding political stuff but If it’s a small meme with ur friends we prob won’t penalize that. Probably just if smthn is viral and anti abortion or smthn like that.

So, to recap: hates copyright, hates “rules,” but will totally use both to do takedowns against things she arbitrarily chooses she doesn’t like, or doesn’t fit the ‘current Overton Window’ whatever that is supposed to mean.

“That’s the only rule.”

Mmkay.

And no Nazi anthems, unless its like a joke “or smthn.” Riiiiight.

Yeah, I’m sure this approach is going to work out for you without any conceivable problems whatsoever.

Good luck to ya, but girl, you ain’t killing copyright. You’re just dressing it up in a Burning Man costume and calling it by another name. It’s still the same old shit.

It’s funny, that Futurism article trashing my AI books has accidentally boosted sales of my non-AI written book, Conspiratopia. It recently pushed out of place Mysterious Antarctica as the current top seller.

This is good proof of what I set out to do in the first place by writing AI books: promote my non-AI books, of which Conspiratopia was always well-received.

In some ways, narratively speaking, many of the early AI Lore books might actually be considered as having been written by the manipulative AIs we first see featured in Conspiratopia, as a means of recruiting people into their project.

Over the past few days, I was looking into whether I could prove if that faked Pentagon smoke image had been made using Midjourney. I’ve done a fair bit of OSINT work in the past, and no stranger to reverse image searches.

Apparently you cannot do reverse image searches from the midjourney.com/app/feed though, which is unfortunate. You can, however, search based on keywords, and maybe find something kind of like what you’re looking for. But given the variability of prompts to begin with, never mind that someone could have started with an image prompt of a building and then used some random text to modify it, the chances of you actually finding the job ID and user account which made an image become pretty low.

I’m not actually in favor of Midjourney’s showing your work to the community by default. I think it breaks protections of personal data baked into GDPR, and filed complaints in the EU about it (which were summarily rejected because I’m not an EU citizen, btw – not because they are not in violation).

That said, if you do have public-by-default images, already being displayed in a community feed, it would only make sense really to have the ability to reverse search an image, and find and follow the creator. As things heat up in the generative political image space, I think we’re going to see many more calls for these services to add more tools beyond just rev. img. search for OSINT investigators, and other enforcement bodies.

Some at least novel reactions to my AI Lore books on this thread at a website called ktt2.com.

Maybe some books deserve to be burned

These are ebooks. But please try.

Ai should be outlawed

Good luck with that.

A lot of people are judging this without actually reading any of the books, classic ktt… I got a really good deal and bought 3 of these books for $50 which is actually really good value since new books are usually $25-30 at least. Amazing reads so far considering how cheap I got em. Don’t even realize its AI

Hard to tell in context, but I guess this is a joke? If it’s not, well… they are wrong.

just read the thirteenth installment in the robussy incantation diaries. s*** was mindblowing this dude is onto something

Again, I guess this is a joke? But I think now I will in fact publish a book called: The Robussy Incantation Diaries: XIII. That’ll teach em!

Art is supposed to be a human experience. If you don’t see how AI can and is harming the landscape I don’t know what to tell you

I know someone with this viewpoint won’t ever be brought around, but I would simply argue that… AI is now a part of the human experience. Hence, it is now a part of art. Get used to it. Within the next few years, our greatest artistic achievements will all use AI extensively.

Another interesting example of what happens as my story gets re-told and distorted in global media.

Presumably as a result of my books appearing in India TV, I’ve seen pick ups from a number of other sites which seem to be India-based as well.

Much like the one that said I had written not 100, but 1000 books, a few of them seem to have few qualms about exaggerating.

One site writes:

Meanwhile, a shocking news is coming out regarding Chat GPT. In fact, an author wrote more than 100 novels in less than a year using this AI tool and earned millions by selling them.

I looked, in case $2000 USD equals millions in india, but it seems to be “only” 165k Rs in India, which I’ve got my suspicions might go a bit further there than it does here.

It’s encouraging to see that some large news outlets in India, like India TV have picked up my story about selling illustrated dystopian AI mini-novels.

They called it a “captivating collection.”

They even add this interesting line, which I don’t think I said anywhere in precisely these terms, but okay:

It is noted that the popularity of AI-generated novels has been on the rise, creating a thriving market for this unique form of literature. 

It’s fun watching how my story gets distorted in the press through less-than-accurate re-reporting by third parties, such as this piece from Livemint.com, asserting that I’ve now written “nearly 1000” books using AI.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I was looking a little at reporting around the FB and Tiktok moderators who sued the companies or are trying to perhaps still (unsure) in class action suits, and found this one, Mar. 2022, Techcrunch:

The lawsuit alleges that TikTok and ByteDance violated California labor laws by failing to provide Velez and Young with adequate mental health support in spite of the mental risks of the “abnormally dangerous activities” they were made to engage with on a daily basis. It also claims that the companies pushed moderators to review high volumes of extreme content to hit quotas and then amplified that harm by forcing them to sign NDAs so they were legally unable to discuss what they saw.

“Defendants have failed to provide a safe workplace for the thousands of contractors who are the gatekeepers between the unfiltered, disgusting and offensive content uploaded to the App and the hundreds of millions of people who use the App every day,” the lawsuit states. It alleges that in spite of knowing the psychological risks of prolonged exposure to such traumatic content, TikTok and ByteDance made no effort to provide “appropriate ameliorative measures” to help workers cope with the extreme content after the fact.

What I’d like to know is actually, what the hell are “appropriate ameliorative measures” for content moderators, either while they’re still doing the job, or after they’ve stopped, and are still experiencing negative fallout psychologically?

I’ve looked it into it a bit, and as far as I’ve seen, there’s really no commonly agreed on industry standard of what this means. Is this lawsuit asking for something that doesn’t actually even exist?