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Comment by photoGrant | Hacker News Reader

You make yourself very clear, you have no intent of understanding my position. I appreciate you trying to troll, but my concern as I've stated for the umpteenth time is that I would like to know if my personal work on my personal website was somehow vacuumed up into a training dataset for profit and war of which I had no knowledge, compensation, or information of.

This isn't a hard and difficult thing to understand and yet you remain prudent in assuming because I'm not Netflix, YouTube, Microsoft, I don't have a right to protect the misuse of my material unless licensed or otherwise agreed.

Really, argue on the merit of my points not the ignorance of your claims.

And of course I would ask here. Asking artists only results in nods of agreement, I don't need the echochamber of impasse, but I suppose I hadn't realised the scale of pseudo-intellectual self labelled technocrats that try to do anything other than understand the problem.

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I completely understand your point, but what you're missing is that your fundamental premise is wrong. Your premise, as stated, is you want to continue to exercise control over your work after your work has been consumed by another. Now you kind of want to weasel around and make a claim like it's about protecting of your IP as if it's a piracy problem. That was not your original claim. I don't think the current copyright laws are just or beneficial but piracy isn't any part of what I advocated.

You're the one who has actively avoided addressing my core issue that has been clear from the beginning. Why do you believe that you can exercise orwellian thought control over the consumers of your content? Because your original premise is saying how do I prevent my content from being used by my consumers in a way that I don't agree with. Unless you would like to redefine your original premise. Because as stated that's what I will disagree with and there is no compromise or middle ground in this point. You do not get to dictate the thoughts of others as a content creator. The fact that you state that you're losing sleep over this is quite serious. I don't say this lightly you might need to seek help for this thought process about an obsessive need to control. You say you don't want an echo chamber but you stamp your feet and plug your ears to everything that I've said.

Friend, I have agreed with your core issue, you have just assumed my work has already been otherwise 'bought' and argued this fact the entire marathon.

Your assumptions of what I'm trying to get at, are what you're arguing against. My position hasn't changed, it's only been explained to you countless times and in many ways.

I will state it again and you're welcome to argue with the below sentence, but again, otherwise you're continuing to play games.

I have a concern that any work that I, or my fellow artists put into this world that is of a physically created nature. Tangible and unique, cannot be protected from the vacuum of OpenAI and their military contracts the same way I can protect them from being copied and hung in every Hilton Hotel. How do I protect myself from contributing to a pirate and their weapon creation? Tell me I can't, anything beyond the brainstem is an externalisation and fair game to anyone and I'll tell you artists will accept that notion and quit enriching this world with anything that adds value vs the capitalistic endeavour to extract it. Culture becomes an algorithm, humans become farm animals. Enjoy your world.

This is where you have a complete flawed understanding of what I'm saying. You're still attempting to control the minds of the consumer that is the core problem and that's what you're missing in my statements. Whether you're consumer is someone who is consumed it and filtered into a visual effects processor or an audio processor or into some learning machine to derive interesting things from it or whether they have fed it in through their eyeballs or their ears and use their own mind to drive interesting things from it it is ultimately the same thing. Your core position still seems to be you want to exert control post consumption.

Your analogy of thinking you can protect something physically placed in a Hilton hotel is a false analogy. The level of protection you have there is the same level of protection of you selling something to a consumer on a piece of physical media or even through a streaming media. The choice is whether you place it in the Hilton or you don't that is the only level of control that you have. Once you've decided to place something in the hotel you have zero control about how the guests will look at it perceive it if they will take photos of it if it will inspire them to do great things and help humanity or if it will turn them into a psychopath. They can examine it in detail and come up with all kinds of bizarre assertions saying that these works in the Hilton hotel support devil worship or some other bizarre claims. They can run it through image processing algorithms and say they're hidden messages inside. It actually is not uncommon for these kinds of bizarre claims to be made about art in public places. All of that is beyond your control and it's beyond any artist control to force the consumer to only understand it in their specific way.

Trying to place AI as some special thing that is magical beyond what humans have done is not a rational claim. For a consumer of the media to take it and run it through an algorithm to process it to derive some meaning from it is the core thing. Placing a buzzword such as AI only distracts from that. People were playing their records backwards and claiming there was messages from the devil on them. I would suspect the authors of the music didn't like this claim that their music was being perverted by playing it backwards and claiming it was some sort of demonic devil worship song poisoning the minds of children. Yet the authors of the music had no control of people spinning their record players backwards. Feeding things through processing algorithms is a thing consumers are allowed to do with the media that they're consuming to help them derive things from it. AI is not magic. So we're back down to the core thing of attempting to exert control on how the consumer can interpret the creative work. You don't get to choose how a consumer consumes and interprets your creative work.

Propaganda was a thing long before AI became a buzzword. And history bears out that artists will not do anything meaningful, they will continue to be artists and then they will be replaced if they don't want to do it anymore. The world is awash and artists and creatives and we are never at any point in history worried about a shortage. Because if you study your history you will see that artists and entertainers have been around since the beginning of time with no concept of intellectual property ownership. It is important for you to study history on this point because intellectual property ownership is a modern created illegal fiction. So much of what you're talking about blatantly ignores history. Not just the history of where intellectual property legal fiction came from but the idea that artist and creative people have never had to worry about their works of being twisted and misused prior to AI. There is hundreds and hundreds of years of History of creative works being misrepresented from their creators intentions. Somehow it has not stopped people from creating artistic works.

And I would argue that at this point in history those who claim to be artistic creators are not enriching this world. Not anymore not with the copyright that is 100 years and the other onerous things. Those artistic creators are actually holding the culture of the world hostage in an attempt to sell it back to them. The fact that you think that artists are creating new things that are enriching the culture is shocking because when is the last time that an artist in their lifetime has released their work to the public domain? I'm sure it happens it's just so rare it never gets reported. Because you don't enrich a culture as an artist until the public has ownership of the works. So fundamentally you're making a bizarre argument that you want some absolute control over something as an artistic creator but also claiming that you're enriching the culture and the public as a whole. I can't think of any two points which can be further apart in this kind of argument.

I'll see you in court. The law will change.

When you have the ability to even debate the complexities of film photography versus digital and the dual nature this medium falls under versus digital which I'll remind you again is under physical, and IP -- try again. But you can only argue under the merits of what you know and you've shown it to be very little.

I do appreciate your efforts but you've done nothing but double down on your ignorance on the matter.

If you can argue it's ok to protect computational lithography, you can protect me doing the exact same thing in the darkroom. But you don't know what you don't know. I'll leave it here, there's no ground to be made, even if you try to conflate a basic issue with paragraphs more.

> And I would argue that at this point in history those who claim to be artistic creators are not enriching this world

Extremely telling. Truly, say no more.

I like how you clip one statement without the rest. By taking my creative work and twisting it to pull out and remove it from the context from what was said you seem to be doing the exact same thing that you're losing sleepover that others might do to your work. I believe you're free to do that and free to be wrong and your assertion and twist my words but I'm also going to call you a big hypocrite.

That is the most truly telling statement because you believe you're enriching the world by attempting to not only denigrate capitalism in one sense but then hold the world hostage as an artistic capitalist in the next. Enriching the world is adding to the culture as a whole so that the culture itself can consume it and that means contributing to the public domain and not locking things under perpetual copyright.

You speak out of both sides of your mouth. You have levied personal attacks against me saying that I'm trolling and you have now engaged in hypocrisy. The only reason a person does those things is because they cannot argue the merits of their point any longer. So this will be my last response because you have effectively diverged from the core topic and cannot engage in a lively logical debate anymore. And history has proven me correct more than it has proved you correct.

You never even read the post enough to engage on the core topic. Keep confusing yourself. The original question was how to find out, you've done all but conflate your issues with my concerns. I quoted the one portion that expressed your position more than the paragraphs of diatribe trying to hide it. Good luck, goodbye!

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