Megacorps like Disney have mountains of exclusive data they “own” that they can use to create their own internal, proprietary, AI systems. They have every sketch, development photo, unused concept art piece, cut scene, note, doodle, rotoscope/animation reference footage, every storyboard, merch design document, you name it.
And that’s on top of every single frame of every movie and TV show. Every panel of every comic.
That’s why Disney supports the efforts to clamp down on AI for copyright reasons, because they own all the copyrights. They want that power in their hands. They do not want you to be able to use a cheap or free utility to compete with them. Along the way, they’ll burn the entire concept of fair use to the ground and snatch the right to copyright styles. Adobe has confessed this intention, straight to congress.
When the lawyers come, you won’t be accused of stealing from say, artist Stephen Silver. You’ll be accused of stealing the style of Disney’s Kim Possible™.
Possible upside? More original art that ACTUALLY LOOKS ORIGINAL.
Disclaimer: Altering laws to lock up styles would be an exceptionally bad thing but it’s also goddamn impossible to legally quantify a visual style, and more importantly, how to quantity how much variance the lock would cover.
Yeah, even as a joke that doesn’t work.
Being confronted with the vague and subjective nature of artistic style just means that a pack of lawyers needs only convince a judge who likely knows nothing about art to come down on how he feels about it, and the problem about style is the less you’re aware of the medium the more similar styles are.
Or, what’s worse, is they’re just run the work through some form of Clip Interrogator, see what style and pop culture references pop up, and hit you from there. Because you won’t even have to get sued!
It would be sinfully easy for them to just make copyright content bots under the DCMA and take your revenue unless you can get lawyer to counter sue, just like on youtube.
The music industry, thanks to the 90s and the RIAA, is much more vicious about fair use than most mediums, having pretty much eliminated the concept as it comes to music. While this has benefited the family of Marvin Gaye greatly, it has been a serious blow to small artists of every stripe.
Ever wonder why Beyonce has piles writers on every track? Its because she’s a massive superstar that can afford to pay the royalties for sample use in ways that in any other industry would be classified as fair use.
And while I’m sure the record labels for all those artists are loving the money, but the functional result is that only a millionaire has access to that kind of sampling without fear of lawsuit. Only a millionaire can afford to record a cover of their father’s favorite song from his childhood.
Because if you even make a reference in your lyrics to a classic song, like Hootie and the Blowfish did with “Only Gonna Be With You”, and Siouxsie and the Banshees got did with “Peek-a-Boo”, some creep is going to come sue you.
Explanation: Hootie quotes a few lines from a Dylan song as part of the lyrics, it is a literal, attributed quote, in the lyrics:
Put on a little Dylan sitting on a fence I say that line is great, you ask me what it meant by Said, I shot a man named Gray, took his wife to Italy She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me I can’t help it if I’m lucky I only wanna be with you Ain’t Bobby so cool? I only wanna be with you
The highlighted part is a quote from “Idiot Wind”. In any other medium, this would be fair use, but the lawyers got their claws extra deep in music. So Dylan threatened to sue a literal fan, who put an attributed quote from a literally twenty-year-old song, and followed it up with the line “Ain’t Bobby so cool?”, and took $350,000 for it.
Meanwhile Peek-A-Boo…
Used the line “Golly jeepers/Where’d you get those weepers?/Peepshow, creepshow/Where did you get those eyes” which is both not the same lyrics as “Jeepers Creepers” (a song from fucking 1938) and a clear and obvious parody of them, but that was enough for a threatened lawsuit and Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer to get unearned writing credits.
The system isn’t just broken, it is sick. You can be factually right but the side with the money and the lawyers will win.
How many here have the kind of resources Darius Rucker had at the height of Only Wanna Be With you?
A society where only the rich can produce work inspired by the things they loved as children, much less one where things their great-grandparents parents loved as children, is fundamentally broken in a way that you’d normally only hear about in kids movies.
And again, this isn’t really about AI. The anti-AI hysteria is a copyright grab and regulatory capture scheme from the Disneys, RIAA’s, Nintendos and Adobe to expand their control of the entertainment and art industries and control who gets to come up and who has to stay down.
There is nothing you can create that they won’t be able to connect back to the things they ‘own’.
Remember, the “fair use for me not for thee” crowd lead by Mr. “I got my career fair use-ing Nintendo’s IP” is bankrolled by the Copyright Alliance.
