I was thinking about this "AI" stuff . . .

[highplainsdem]

61. Thanks, but I'm just trying to relay some of what I've heard from artists and writers and others

whose work has been stolen by AI companies who want the value of that work to go to them.

Just saw another blatant example this morning, in a long thread on Reddit pointing out that the Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, who removed all their music from Spotify last summer, now has what is apparently an AI clone on Spotify:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1phag1t/spotify_now_features_ai_band_clones/

I've met a lot of creatives on X who have a lot to say about the theft of their work...and I've seen all too many AI users there showing really vicious envy of real creatives, calling them elitist gatekeepers. I've never forgotten one of those AI using wannabes taunting a British painter who'd just finished a lovely seascape after a few days by uploading it to some AI model to churn out near copies of it in a few minutes.

And when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman launched ChatGPT's new image generator last spring, he also encouraged a craze for copying the style of a Japanese artist famously opposed to AI art who had called it "an insult to life itself" -

https://fortune.com/2025/03/28/sam-altman-chatgpt-gpus-melting-ai-images/

A craze the Trump regime approved of - and OpenAI has been very supportive of Trump, who in turn doesn't want AI companies regulated.

https://time.com/7272593/studio-ghibli-memes-trump-white-house/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/magazine/studio-ghibli-ai-images-deportation.html

From that NYT piece:

Haters like me felt obligated to point out that this Ghiblification seemed likely to rely on ChatGPT’s having been fed Ghibli movies as training, with no permission sought or compensation offered. (All OpenAI has said on the subject is that the new model was trained on “images reflecting a vast variety of image styles.”) These movies are painstakingly constructed stories about the irreducibility of the human spirit and the fragile beauty of nature. The Ghiblified images are something else, something that wouldn’t be out of place in a Miyazaki movie: a swarm of cheap knockoffs feeding parasitically off the essence of the originals, cranked out by a technology so plunderously energy-intensive that coal plants slated for closure have been kept open just to keep it running. But pointing this out risked sounding like a killjoy: They were just memes, right?

By March 27, the meme had reached the White House, or at least its official X account, where a news release about the planned deportation of a Dominican woman — a convicted fentanyl dealer — was paired with a Ghiblified image of this woman weeping in shackles.

-snip-

Not long ago, the United States government would, by default, seek to distance itself from images like this; often, as with images of post-9/11 torture, the government actively suppressed or destroyed them. The Trump administration releases them on purpose, implicitly arguing that their content is a source of pride and amusement. (If the Abu Ghraib photos leaked today, it’s possible to imagine that the White House would repost them approvingly.) It drops any sugarcoating or performance of restraint and gives us crass gloating, assigning Trump the role of the merciless, enthusiastic deporter in chief — no matter what the actual numbers look like. On April 6, the White House posted another Ghiblified meme, this one pairing a cartoon JD Vance with a quotation from him about refusing to let the “far left” influence deportation policy.

This administration isn’t the only one trying to play the latest meme game. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, a leading figure of the global far right (and a big A.I. fan), posted a Ghiblified self-portrait; Sam Altman reposted it. The Israeli Army, which has used A.I. to plan its strikes on Gaza, posted Ghiblified images of its personnel; the Israeli Embassy in India posted Ghiblified images of Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu together. Just as A.I.-powered Ghiblification is an easy way to give any image you want a sought-after vibe, political memes are a way to cultivate a defiantly jubilant online mood with no fixed relationship to reality.

This is deliberate exploitation of an artist by both an AI company CEO using an artist's style to say F U to him and anyone else who opposes the theft of intellectual property, and by rightwing authoritarian politicians using it to show their "defiantly jubilant" mood - which is really gleeful bullying. Whether it's from the Trump regime or Sam Altman or some unknown AI user on X, trying to hurt a real artist he could never equal.

I've met artists who are nearly suicidal from what AI has done to their livelihoods and those of other artists they know.

And I've met a lot of teachers, too, who are in despair over the AI companies taking a wrecking ball to education, encouraging students to cheat with AI, telling them it isn't really cheating but "just another tool." They know those kids aren't learning. Some of those teachers are planning to quit teaching. I've also met teachers who are thinking they can carve out some niche for themselves trying to justify using AI in education - these jobs are sometimes directly funded by AI companies in effect using the teachers as shills - but even these paid shills are often conflicted over AI use so obviously undermining education. I remember one of them posting a horrified message about an AI tool blatantly advertised as something to use for cheating. I saw the CEO of one AI company post on X to tell students to use AI to cheat their way through school to get that degree, and then AI would be their "superpower" after they graduated.

In the last three years I've read thousands of articles about AI and at least tens of thousands of social media posts about it. It was clear from the immediate impacts of ChatGPT three years ago that it would cause harm, but I didn't realize then just how much harm it would cause, or how fast. I wasn't expecting the AI bros to line up behind Trump, either.

But they're apparently hoping to make common cause with his lawlessness, and they see in him a fellow thief. They don't want AI regulated. And they do want intellectual property laws weakened or done away with completely, so they'll never be punished for all the IP they stole. They're no different in that sense from any other criminals cozying up to Trump.