What’s most disturbing about the “is AI art or not” debate is that IP holders don’t care.
Disney is famously litigious. But not only are they licensing their catalogue to OpenAI, they now have $1B in it. That tells you everything you need to know about where their values actually are.
What about Sony Music and Universal Music, both known for filing lots of lawsuits? They now have licensing deals with Suno AI, with only WMG acting as the supposed holdout. Oh right, and that’s because WMG already has a deal with Suno’s competitor, Stability. Principle solved. It was just market positioning.
And you can bet this is just the beginning. You think book publishers, video game publishers, film studios, broadcasters, archive owners, etc. aren’t going to get their cut eventually? Of course they are. Any new surface for rent extraction will be enclosed, licensed, and monetized.
They don’t care about hand-crafted art. They care about control and revenue. Always have.
To be clear, I’m not saying hand-crafted art is doomed, or that we shouldn’t try to make it. People will always make art. What I’m saying is that for the firms who own massive swaths of IP, none of this is a moral question. It’s leakage versus control. If the machine remixes culture and they get paid, great. If humans remix culture without permission, lawyers.
And that’s the part that really pisses me off. These are the same IP holders who spent decades trying to crush remix culture, narrow fair use, and treat the public domain like a contagious disease. Now they’re perfectly happy to let machines recombine culture at industrial scale, as long as the cheques clear.
They never hated remixing. They hated unpaid remixing they didn’t own. AI just made that distinction easier to enforce.
RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/964af951-e487-4b25-8fa9-f51639093bc9
