Colin Kaepernick getting into turnkey IP theft reminds me a little bit of when people were taking the FTX money. They couldn't really have understood everything that went into that decision, and I think it's more or less the same thing here. "AI" is a variety of things, many of which are almost toys at this stage of adoption: social media filters, chatbots, that kind of thing. That person probably isn't going to have a strong understanding of what underlying processes result in a picture of them on a couch being transformed into a picture of themselves as an Anime Paragon. I think this is most people, frankly. It's a buzzy space because people with draconic amounts of money slaver at the prospect of a neofeudal order. Similar to a few years ago, when "blockchain" and "Web3" were the magic words that gave petitioners entre to the secret vaults, now we just got some new words. "Online" was once one of these sacred words, for example. "Social," etc. If all you have to do is say some words, I can understand why a person would say the words. Especially if it could mean freedom - blessed freedom, once and for all - from artists.
It's at the point now where if something AI related comes out, we have to take a second and really think about whether or not we want to do that as a comic. We've sorta been over it. Like a hundred fucking times.
Part of the reason we give in on occasion is because of what I said at the jump, which is that it might be that one of these strips gets out there into somebody's feed and they might think for a second about it, and be like… wait. How is it able to do this? Because it's important to understand how. But it's at the point where more and more media tendrils essentially have to make Faustian bargains. Newer models, either in the technological sense or the business sense, are madly spinning the tumbler on this thing and there is incredible incentives to do so.
One of the reasons I'm hesitant to re-enter the arena is that the arguments have gotten incredibly reductive. I think there are social, legal, and aesthetic reasons to be wary of these technologies, and there are people who think that a machine ingesting a corpus of other people's property and manufacturing clever forgeries based on it is indistinguishable from a child learning to draw. They believe that as hard as I believe my shit. I'm not even sure arguments of any kind are actually occurring, and in a world where chaos winds are blowing a hundred or more miles an hour no legislative body is prioritizing this at all. And that's before we start engaging with a concept like national security, and an unwillingness to hobble the dark potential of one's own National Demon.
I guess I'll gently suckle on my Google/Microsoft Monopoly Redux as a consolation prize. And make the occasional .jpeg, I guess.
(CW)TB out.
