A.I. Art: The Nuclear Option

Recently Marc Brunet, a former head of Blizzard's concept art department, released a video, after conferring with his lawyer, wherein he discussed a staggering decision by the States' federal patent office: apparently,  art is defined, as intellectual property, by its production by human hands: meaning, if you just rattled off a prompt for a computer to follow, like ordering a burger at Wendy's, you have no legitimate claim on the result! Apparently, the patent office, as of now, does not grant copyrights to any piece of A.I. generated "art": which means, as said imagery has no legitimate owner-- and as the imagery was produced by an illicit program scraping references from preexisting art--without consent nor compensation--it's one hundred fucking percent open season on A.I. as "intellectual property"; because it's not legitimate property.

 Soooo, yeah, that begs the question, then, dudn't it? Should we fight fire with fire? Knowing that A.I. art, as it stands, is scraped from the internet through the automatic theft of casual and professional artists, even if this news isn't accurate should we start swiping their uploads and posting them ourselves? Flooding D.A.'s intellectual market place with these knock-off paintings, defanging them of any pretense of ownership, let alone creative propriety? Motivating A.I. artists to rage quit, because, as fast as they can rattle off a prompt to an A.I., we can swipe their stolen goods and devalue their clout? That is the question, y'all.

 Not only can we piss all over their prompt-based fuckery, by swiping it and sticking those uploads in a separate folder honestly labeled "A.I." , we can still produce our own original works. Something I'd estimate about, oh, 99.9% of these hacks can't, because, otherwise, most of these fuckers wouldn't have accounts no less than two months old, with galleries populated exclusively by counterfeit tits they didn't draw.

 Should we sail the high seas, lads, and engage in some cathartic piracy, or just keep blocking them? Blocking A.I. trash on sight, to reiterate, is perfectly justified, but, as prudent as it is, it isn't achieving the visceral dividends we need to win this culture war; because this is a culture war, and, as I'm wont to repeat, in a rigged game of baseball you don't play baseball, you play football. You still need to play a game with rules, based on objective terms and goals, but, yes, play football until the assholes who rigged the baseball game realize baseball is less dangerous. If you cannot escalate--if you can only harrumph about the unfairness of it all-- that one side dared to bring a gun to a knife fight--then you can kiss your way of life goodbye forever. We are in a culture war for the soul of this site: on one side there's a community with a clear and delineated drawing-room sense of decorum, promoting art made by human minds and human hands; while conversely, on the other side, there's a perverse innovation. Instead of artists, they're clout-chasers spamming the site with the creations of hard-working artists they objectively don't respect. We don't respect or tolerate this behavior when someone dumps a pin-up by Elvgren into their gallery, claiming proprietary rights because they slapped a DA water mark on it, and we shouldn't tolerate A.I., either. We need to demoralize this fringe of plagiarists by devaluing their clout--because it's all based on theft!

The prompt-trolls are subscribing to companies that are charging a fee to use the technology they developed by stealing from countless numbers of artists; these customers are feeding the software more pictures without permission, perfecting the software and furthering its popularity through theft. Theft that, and I don't think this can ever be expressed too much, is at our direct expense as honest, hard-working artists, casual and professional alike.

Personally,  the idea of posting factory-made cheesecake, even with full transparency and a finite goal in mind, is disgusting; but, so is breaking up fatbergs in the sewer. Someone still has to do it.