You are my favourite poster. Keep it up comrade.

This is a direct consequence of the post-mao reform period.

These liberal ideas are widespread throughout China, not part of some vocal minority. Liberal economics are taught in schools. The ruling class, as you mentioned, is taught in the western tradition. Regardless of the direction of the country or the intention of the CPC, people's day to day experience with the means of production is capitalistic, and they want to be successful in this domain. The media in China has largely taken a pro-US stance since the 90s and until very recently, most people thought it was a utopia (the majority still do), so people want to emulate that model.

This is not something a purge can fix. It's a response to the development of the means of production.

All those western educated libs China has running around inside its pipes need to get their asses purged

AI work can be copyrighted. Millions must be purged.

TIL if I make a program that just takes the Mona Lisa from a file and gives me back the Mona Lisa in another file with a bit of random noise attached that's now my IP as long as there was a text prompt where you have to write "Adult woman, oil painting, Renaissance, smile, landscape background, art, sunny."

Akshully any new technology that takes work away from artists is automatically bad. That's why nobody on Hexbear uses a camera and commissions portraits from local artists out of principle instead.

Your take license has been revoked. You are no longer allowed to have takes.

All of these AI tools are based on models trained on illegaly obtained samples from non-consenting artists. This is the key issue behind copyright. Its both the issue of failing to protect artists original copyright while granting copyright to art created through these tools.

In a sane and honest economic system you'd hire a lot of these artists to create art specificaly for this, seek their consent and pay them according to the number of samples they have on the model, or respect their choice if they don't want their art sampled period. These are just naive suggestions I'm sure there are better proposals too.

If you took all the steps above people would be a lot more open and positive about it. At the end of the day these tools are impossible to stop but it is the openly brazen lack of morality and justice of capitalism here that makes it obvious for people.

Corporations cried about piracy since the rise of fucking VHS tape recorders 30 or 40 years ago. They lied and manipulated the narrative of digital piracy in the early 2000s, but now it is 2023, the internet is old now so it is suddenly not piracy when you scrape millions of pieces of art from the web.

I think a complete no copyright stance would be the most realistic. If we assume you'll never be able to completely make sure someone didn't plagiarize or "reference" some prior art then at least don't make it worse by endorsing a tool built on entirely the premise of referencing and plagiarizing previous art.

And this is also seperate as to whether these tools are good or bad.

But it's not the same as MS Paint. MS Paint requires you to do something to create something in it. AI is trained on other art and recreates it. It'd be like copying a picture of Goku from s01e01 of Dragon Ball into MS Paint, using the paint bucket to change his hair color, and claiming it as copyrightable.

The issue here isn't individuals using AI to make art, you can make AI art to your hearts content, print it out, frame it. I don't care.

Problem is a bunch of companies are trying to replace artists with AI. AI doesn't create original art, or collages art from other artists together. This means if, for example, Raytheon used AI to make an add, and a big chunk of that ad is from a painting I made, I can't object to a piece of my art being used to sell bombs.

Even collage art made by actual humans doesn't get used in corporate advertising much for the same reason, if an artist sees their work being used in the college they may object to it. This is less a problem with independent artists. I actually make college art myself.

And while I love showing it to people I'm very hesitant to use it in any context where I may directly profit from it cuz I wouldn't want to offend any of the people who made the original images. I doubt it would happen cuz generally I take material from advertising and change the context enough that the original creator probably wouldn't recognize it. Thing is I'm a human, I can understand that context and make a judgment call about it, and other humans can object if they disagree with my judgment about it and try and hold me accountable. An AI wouldn't be able to do that.

I'd have less objections to AI art if it was always clearly watermarked (which China is apparently trying to do) and it was always clear who the person who generated it was, but right now AI is just pumping out tons of images with no way for artists to know if their images were used in it and who's profiting from it.