Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?

21/

And now, with total predictability, Universal - the largest music company in the world - has announced that it will start training voice-clones with the music in its catalog:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/umg-startsai-voice-clone-partnership-with-soundlabs-1235041808/

This comes hot on the heels of a massive blow-up between Universal and Tiktok, in which Universal professed its outrage that Tiktok was going to train voice-clones with the music Universal licensed to it.

23/

As we learned from George Orwell's avant-garde animated agricultural documentary *Animal Farm*, the problem isn't who holds the whip, the problem is the whip itself:

> The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Entertainment execs and tech execs alike are obsessed with AI because they view the future of "content" as fundamentally passive.

25/

In other words: Universal's copyright claims over AI training cash out to this: "If anyone is going to profit from immiserating musicians, it's going to be us, not Tiktok."

I understand why Universal would like this idea. I just don't understand why any musician would root for Universal to defeat Tiktok, or Getty Images to trounce Stable Diffusion. Do you really think Getty *likes* paying photographers and wants to give them a single penny more than they absolutely have to?

24/

Here's @ryanbroderick putting it better than I ever could:

> At a certain audience size, you just assume those people are locked in and will consume anything you throw at them. Then it just becomes a game of lowering your production costs and increasing your prices to increase your margins. This is why executives love AI and why the average American can’t afford to eat at McDonald’s anymore.

https://www.garbageday.email/p/ceo-passive-content-obsession

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After 40 years of expanded copyright, we have a creative industry that's larger and more profitable than ever, and yet the share of income going to creative workers has been in steady decline over that entire period. Every year, the share of creative income that creative workers can lay claim to declines, both proportionally and in real terms.

28/

Here's a rule of thumb for tech policy prescriptions. Any time you find yourself, as a worker, rooting for the same policy as your boss, you should check and make sure you're on the right side of history. The fact that creative bosses are so obsessed with making copyright cover more kinds of works, restrict more activities, lasting longer and generating higher damages should make creative workers look askance at these proposals.

27/

There's no amount of money that will satisfy the bullies and leave enough left over for the kid to buy lunch. They just take *everything*.

Telling creative workers that they can solve their declining wages with more copyright is a denial that creative workers are *workers* at all. It treats us as entrepreneurial small businesses, LLCs with MFAs negotiating B2B with other companies. That's how we lose.

30/

As with the mystery of Spotify's payments, this isn't a mystery at all. You just need to understand that when creators are stuck bargaining with a tiny, powerful cartel of movie, TV, music, publishing, streaming, games or app companies, it doesn't matter how much copyright they have to bargain with. Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid more lunch-money.

29/

On the other hand, if we address the problems of AI and labor as *workers*, and insist on labor rights - like the Writers Guild did when it struck last summer - then we ally ourselves with every other worker whose wages and working conditions are being attacked with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.

31/

Here's a thing: FTC chair Lina Khan recently told an audience that she was thinking of using her Section 5 powers (to regulate "unfair and deceptive" conduct) to go after AI training:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

Khan has already used these Section 5 powers to secure labor rights, for example, by banning noncompetes:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

33/

The US Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that AI-generated works don't qualify for copyrights, meaning everything AI generated can be freely copied and distributed and the companies that make them can't stop them. This is *fantastic* news, because the only thing our bosses hate more than paying us is not being able to stop other people from copying the things we make for them. We should be shouting this from the rooftops, not demanding *more* copyright for AI.

32/

Creative workers should be banding together with other labor advocates to propose ways for the FTC to prevent *all* AI-based labor exploitation, like the "reverse-centaur" arrangement in which a human serves as an AI's body, working at breakneck pace until they are psychologically and physically ruined:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

34/

Spotify's relationship to artists can be kind of confusing. On the one hand, they pay a laughably low per-stream rate, as in homeopathic residues of a penny. On the other hand, the Big Three labels get a *fortune* from Spotify. And on the other other hand, it makes sense that rate for a stream heard by one person should be less than the rate for a song broadcast to thousands or millions of listeners.

1/

@silverwizard It's entirely up, maybe your node is having synch problems.

@silverwizard Ah, I just hadn't hit publish!

These people can kid themselves that they're only taking away your power and handing it to their boss because they have your best interests at heart. As Upton Sinclair told us, it's impossible to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

The only way to get a tech boss to consistently treat you well is to ensure that if they stop, you can quit. Anything less is a one-way ticket to enshittification.

71/

Technologists who work for giant tech companies can come up with endless scalesplaining explanations for why their bosses, and not you, should decide how your computer works. They're wrong. Your computer should do what you tell it to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1

70/

It's been more than 20 years since Seth Schoen and I got a demo of Microsoft's first "trusted computing" system, with its "remote attestations," which let remote servers demand and receive accurate information about what kind of computer you were using and what software was running on it.

This *could* be beneficial to the user - you could send a "remote attestation" to a third party you trusted and ask, "Hey, do you think my computer is infected with malicious software?"

63/

But this remote attestation feature could *also* be used to allow Microsoft to block you from opening a Word document with Libreoffice, Apple Pages, or Google Docs, or it could be used to allow a website to refuse to send you pages if you were running an ad-blocker. In other words, it could transform your information fiduciary into a faithless agent.

65/