What do you mean by "in-group signalling" in that post?
I’m referring to the way a lot of people seem to treat “unconditional hatred for Generative AI” as a signifier by which someone reaffirms their belonging or allegiance to the category of Artist (imagined as a special category of people wholly separate from the category of Non-Artist) based on the conception that the only reason why someone might not hate GenAI (or might hate it but think some criticisms of it are unprincipled) is because they 1) aren’t an Artist themselves, and thus 2) they either don’t understand what being an Artist is like or they categorically hate and oppose Artists.
To name a concrete example:
Just a couple weeks ago I got an anon message pretty much along the lines of “I get it, you don’t have a creative bone in your body and have to pretend that art theft is fine because you’re incapable of creating art yourself” (despite pretty clear evidence of me being an Artist™, such as the fact that at the moment that anon was sent to me, you could scroll down like two posts on my blog and find me showing off how some of my music was featured in a doom metal compilation album).
This anon was sent in response to me saying that, while I have problems with the GenAI industry, I think “it’s art theft” is not one of them because (by virtue of being a copyright abolitionist) I think describing any situation where a copy of something is made without affecting the original as “theft” is patently ridiculous. Like, that’s a pretty clear example of how performing enough unconditional hatred of AI art is treated as a signifier of belonging to the Artist™ in-group, and failure to perform it is treated as a sign that you can only possibly be a ignorant and/or malicious Non-Artist.
Copyright is a bad tool but it’s the only one we have right now for ensuring artists get paid. A copyright abolitionist in the current environment is taking an “only rich people should be able to make art full time” stand that I find somewhat disagreeable. Sure there is often beauty in the work of an amateur, but there are things you can only master through a lifetime of work and trained skill.
There’s another thing here that feels like a fundamental unfairness. Generative AI is a tool designed to make money for the companies running it and drive down the price professionals can charge for the categories of work that it generates. If OpenAI scrape my online work without my consent and use it to train their models and then a) people who used to pay me instead pay them to generate art in my style or b) clients use the threat of that to pay me less than I would normally earn then they are benefiting from my labour and I am not. I made the thing. They used my years of work and learning to make money - money they would not earn without my work - and only I lose out as a consequence. That still feels kinda thefty to me.
Copyright fundamentally does not ensure that artists get paid. In fact the way copyright works in actual fact almost without fail serves to deny artists profits while making sure that corporations (who are the ones that hold copyrights most of the time) make money off of the work of artists.
And significantly it’s not the only tool we have for ensuring that artists get paid. There is a tendency to reduce the whole category of “artists” into this image of artisans who create individual pieces on commission, when most artists do rote wage labor (the people who work on animated films are artists). The majority of artists do not get their wages thanks to copyright law, but through labor laws.
So like, not only is copyright a bad tool for ensuring that artists get paid (because in a vast majority of cases it all but ensures that copyrights actually do not get held by artists but by corporations) there are other tools we have for making sure artists do get paid.
Exactly like. The vast majority of people who actually make art as a full time job don’t do it as independent artists, they’re working as writers, animators, illustrators, composers, color artists, background artists, etc etc etc in a variety of media projects like TV shows, videogames, and movies, and the vast majority of them (i.e. those who aren’t big enough industry household names to be able to demand it) do not actually own the copyright to any of the things they create for these projects at the end of the day.
So the assertion that copyright is the “only tool” we have for ensuring that artists get paid is kinda revelatory of a very “petit-bourgeois artisan” conceptualization of the idea of Artist that ends up actually excluding the vast majority of working artists.
Also, no matter how much the situation described sucks, the assertion that it “feels thefty” is one that only makes sense if you subscribe to the mindset that the loss of potential profits that exist only in theory constitutes theft. And that’s a mindset that has led to A LOT of really bad shit.
Yeah, and also the idea that copyright abolition would somehow end up disproportionately benefiting the rich is ludicrous. Like, corporations that make a select few people ludicrous amounts of money are some of the fiercest protectors of copyright. They are not doing so out of the goodness of their hearts or because they want to look out for the interests of poor artists. The rich too have class interests and if copyright abolition were seriously something that would benefit the rich you could bet there would be an international campaign promoted by the richest people alive trying to get governments to overturn copyright law.