Phil Foglio, a man I once purchased pornography from ironically, recently posted about the list of artists MidJourney proudly used in their training model. He's suggesting that he has a good lawyer. For my part, I was delighted to learn that my own name was on the list! I thought maybe I was just drafting on Gabriel's potent comet, but this list has revealed to me that I am a co-equal creator and it's time to take the fore.
The reason that they should be worried isn't merely that their defenders are concussed, servile invertebrates. That should certainly give them pause. No, the reason they should be worried is quite simple actually: that the masters of the old order, the one they would usurp, are functionally the ones that wrote the laws around copyright. They are not kind. You might be familiar with the cat-o'-nine-tails - imagine, if you will, a cat with ten or even eleven tails.
Purveyors of these technologies, and the rest of their circle of hell, all have arguments for why they should be able to steal as much shit as they want forever and they sound stupid when they say them. Here they are, rendered with the charity they deserve:
Meta: We stole so much stuff that, actually, we didn't steal any stuff
Google: If things were different, things would be totally different
Andreeson Horowitz: But we already spent so much money
Microsoft: Think about how this would hurt the little guys, like us
Anthropic: Fucking shut up about it
Hugging Face: It's super legal but honestly it might not be idk
StabilityAI: It's legal in places that aren't here
It needs to be tested in court. Let me revise: It needs to have been tested in court. Already. Because now, in the time tested fashion of the American legal system, they'll simply use their ill-gotten profits to destroy legal and moral claimants. It's just classic fuckin' shit.
We've got another slow-cooked #Fridabe stream for you, bursting with flavor. Bronze and His Balvinity, Lord Balvin are on deck to try out the latest version of Ravenswatch, which was really fun last time we checked it out. We'll hit that up, and then see if Deep Rock Galactic or Darktide should take over. Stream starts up a little after 10.
(CW)TB out.
