The intellectual property views of traditional artists in the age of NFTs and Generative "AI"

I recently came to a really interesting realization.

So, okay. We all remember the huge cultural phenomenon that was NFTs, that appeared for like a couple months and then immediately disappeared again, right?

What were NFTs exactly?

I'll tell you: they were a way of building a ledger that links specific "creative works" (JPEGs, in the original case, but theoretically others as well – and yes, most NFTs weren't exactly creative) to specific owners, in a way that was difficult to manipulate and easy to verify. Yes, it was implemented using blockchain technology, so that ledger was distributed and trustless and cryptographically verified and blah blah blah, but the core of it was establishing hard line verifiable ownership of a given person over a given piece of content, and to prevent copying and tampering. It was an attempt to introduce the concepts and mecahnics of physical asset ownership into the digital noosphere, to make it possible to own "digital assets."

The backlash against NFTs that I saw from indie artistic and progressive communities was centered on three fundamental observations:

1. The concept of "theft" of a digital "asset" that you "own" is fundamentally absurd, because someone else creating a duplicate of some digital information that you "own" but publicly shared doesn't harm you in any way. It doesn't take away money or assets or access that you previously actually had, it doesn't involve breaking into something of yours, or damaging anything of yours, or threatening you.
2. Physical-asset-like "ownership" of digital assets is not only also absurd, but completely impossible, because as soon as you publicly broadcast any digital asset, as many copies are made as people view your work. That's how broadcasting digital information works: it's copied to the viewers' computers – and from there all they need to do is "Right click, save as…" and then make as many copies as they want and distribute them themselves; and furthermore, any attempt to prevent this will always violate the freedom and privacy of everyone (see also: DRM).
3. Treating infinitely copiable digital echoes, patterns of information stored as bits in a computer, as ownable assets, introduces distorted, insane dynamics into the noosphere, because now you have market dynamics, but not actually grounded in any kind of actual value or labor or rivelrous, scarce asset. And that's what we saw.

And what was the praxis, based on these critiques, against NFTs? Nothing less than widespread digital piracy. Not against coporations, but against individual artists. Now, you might dismiss this characterization, because that piracy wasn't technically illegal – as the right to own NFTs had not yet been codified into law – or because those artists were often grifters – incompetent, unoriginal, soulless techbros looking to make a quick cash grab – but the quality of a piece of art doesn't dictate whether it's a creative expression of some kind (we've all seen tons of incredibly lazy fanfic in our day, I'm sure), and the technical legality of what was done doesn't actually change the characteristics of the action (if all IP was abolished tomorrow, I'm sure most indie artists would still insist on it, in the current cultural climate, but we're coming to that)!

So the response to NFT was fundamentally just the idea that you can't own an image or other artistic work that is purely represented as digital information because it's infinitely copyable and piracy is a thing. And because owning pieces of the digital noosphere is illegitimate and introduces all kinds of bad mechanics into the economy.

And I'm sure you all can see where I'm going with this now.

Because, now that GenAI is on the scene, what has become the constant refrain, the shrill rallying cry, of the indie artists (as well as the big megacorporations, funnily enough)? Nothing less than the precise inverse of what it was in the face of NFTs:

1. Copying information – a digital "asset" of some creative work – is now theft, and causes real damage to those who've had it copied; they somehow lose something deeply important in the copying.
2. We must rush to introduce centralized registries, or embedded metadata, about who owns what digital "asset," and rigerously enforce this ownership with controls on copying and viewing and usage, at whatever cost, through means like DRM.
3. Treating infinitely copiable digital echoes as if they're ownable physical assets is not bad, but in fact important and necessary to save the economy, freedom, democracy, and artistic livlihoods!

Not only that, but suddenly piracy, especially piracy of an individual artist's work, is the highest crime imaginable. Look at how people are talking about Meta using libgen – a tool all of us use to pirate the works of individual artists every day, from what I can tell looking at online discussion in artistic and progressive circles – to get books to train Llama!

Suddenly, it feels as if every independent artist that hated NFTs when they came out would actually be a fan of them, if they'd been introduced by a different cultural subsection of the population (artistic advocates instead of cryptobros), if they'd been explained in different terms (in terms of "preventing exploitation of labor" and "worker ownership of the products of their labor" instead of in terms of capitalist property and financial assets), and if they'd arrived after the advent of generative AI.

What the fuck is going on here?

I think it's two things.

One, as much as we valorize independent artists and progressive activists as vanguards of morality and clear sightedness and human values, they're just humans like the rest of us, and ninety-nine percent of the time, their reactions to things are dictated by tribalism – if something is introduced to them by a side of the culture wars they don't like, it's bad; if it's introduced by a side they do like, it's good, and it's as simple as that. So since NFTs were introduced by cryptobros, they found whatever reasons they needed to say NFTs were bad, and when techbros (often former cryptobros) introduced GenAI, progressives and artists found whatever justification they needed to say GenAI was bad.

The other aspect, I think, is material interests. When NFTs originally came around, they were solving an economic problem no one had yet – needing to own digital assets to protect economic interests – so they were mostly peddled by grifters and scam artists, and they offered no material benefit to artists, while coming from a side of the culture war artists are rightly opposed to – so it was easy (if also, but perhaps only incidentally, right) for artists dismiss and make fun of them. But now that GenAI exists, the underlying goals of the NFT technology and movement, its underlying philosophy, actually does serve the economic interests of artists, so now they're embracing them, mostly without even realizing it. Basically, it's as simple as that: the economic interests of artists weren't in play before, so they were free to make fun of grifters and scam artists and play culture war with an easy target, but now that their economic interests are at stake, they've been forced to switch sides.

So it's not as if this shift is exactly irrational or nonsensical. It makes sense, and is even sympathetic, at a certain level. The point I'm trying to make here is that no matter how morally justified and principled the popular backlash against these things may seem, it fundamentally isn't. It's just about base, selfish economic interests and culture war tribalism all the way down. Artists are not the noble outsiders we make them seem to be; they're just as much an economic class with a tendency to wide amoral backlashes to protect their interests as Rust Belt workers are. That doesn't mean individual views on the matter can't be nuanced and principled, or that you can't even find some way – although I don't see a convincing one – to thread the needle and condemn both NFTs and GenAI, but on a societal level, the public outcry is no more principled than the reaction to negative stimulii of an amoeba.