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When Conquistadors stole Aztec gold — which largely came in the form of cultural artifacts or religious items — they often melted it down into simple, crude even, gold bars for easier transport:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/gold-bar-once-belonged-aztec-emperor-moctezuma-180973959/
After all, they were not interested in the cultural and religious significance of these items. They just wanted the gold, which they could easily sell to others.
By reducing it to the raw material they destroyed the cultural and historical context. We are all poorer for it.
/1
I think it is fair to say that such destruction of cultural artifacts, such reduction of items that had meaning and significance to people is a type of violence in and of itself, regardless of how these items were acquired.
But of course those who created these works of art and these religious items in the first place, and others for whom they had significance — maybe they were family heirlooms? — were never asked for consent.
Conquistadors took it all because nobody could stop them.
/2
When #AI techbros train their #LLMs on people's works, these works are similarly removed from their individual context, "melted down" into the raw material — training data. Just disembodied words and phrases and sentences for the model to parrot later.
Historical and cultural and social context of these works is destroyed, melted away.
And it also happens without consent.
And it also happens on a gigantic scale.
And it also happens because techbros can sell the output.
/3
And it also happens because nobody can stop them from crawling the open web and slurping all these cultural artifacts into their training raw materials.
After all, "this was all out there in the open; by publishing it online, authors asked for it to be crawled."
And it also, I dare say, is a form of violence.
And we will also be poorer for it.
/4/end
@rysiek There is a kind of maniacal enthusiasm for engineering technical things that ignore inherent rights. Just because it is technically feasible to build something, does not mean that it is legal or morally justifiable.
This same headlong rush is now going on with illegal Fediverse bridges to corporate platforms that extract a license to the content. These bridge builders do not have the right to license Fediverse content. The copyright belongs to the author of the content.
@mastodonmigration and even if we ignore the legality aspect, it can still be immoral and wrong to do
@rysiek It all kind of has its genesis in Napster and Youtube. When these things came out, many were shocked by the blatant disregard for content rights that they flaunted. Never-the-less they persisted, grew fast, and while licensing issues were eventually adjudicated, the lesson that Silicon Valley learned was to "go fast and break things" (like laws and ethical boundaries) and clean up later after pocketing billions. It's now the standard MO of tech culture.
@mastodonmigration there is also a lot wrong with copyright as it stands today. I don't like the term "content rights" just as I don't like the term "content", as it also make it seem as if works are interchangeable, a "resource" to be used by the big players.
We need to reform copyright such that authors actually get more agency. Both in the sense of being able to control how big corporations exploit their works, but also in the sense of being able to build on previous works of others.
You don't need to reform copyright because of that. You already have plenty of control in the Law.
Scraping online content and use it in ways it isn't allowed is illegal.
What you need is to enforce the Law: identify the cases and bring them to court.
Otherwise you'll just fall in to the hole of DRM and perpetual copyright.
What the _buyers_ of those systems MUST require is the identification of the sources used.
@gvlx I was talking about copyright reform in a more general sense. Copyright law as it stands today benefits the gatekeepers and Big Tech way more than it benefits individual creators.
@mastodonmigration
Once copyrights are traded you no longer distinguish authors and holders.
I would call on copyright sales contract reform, where the original authors always keep a share of the each subsequent sale's proceedings, through out their life.
I think that is something that has already the subject of discussion in the art world.
> Once copyrights are traded you no longer distinguish authors and holders.
And that's one of the problems.
In Polish copyright law that distinction remains, though, to some extent.
> I would call on copyright sales contract reform, where the original authors always keep a share of the each subsequent sale's proceedings, through out their life.
Definitely not "throughout their life", as that blocks creativity (especially of young, up-and-coming creators) that thrives on cultural references and ability to base on previous culturally significant work.
Consider all the stuff around Mickey Mouse and how Disney stifles independent creativity.