Why am I being so mean to indie artists? Am I a tech bro?

To be perfectly clear, the purpose of this post, and all my other posts on this page expressing frustration at popular views concerning information ownership and "intellectual property," is not to punch down at independent artists and progressive activists. I care a lot about them, because I'm one, and I know many others; I'm deeply sympathetic to their values and goals and their need for a livelihood.

The reason I write so much about this topic, directed as often if not moreso at independent artists as corporations trying to enclose the commons, is that while I expect big corporations – whether Disney or OpenAI – to be unprincipled, to push for convenient laws and regulations that expand their property rights, introduce scarcity, and lock down free sharing, expression, and the creation of new things for their own material gain, I expect so much better from artists and activists, and so it's deeply frustrating to see them fail, to see them fall back on justifications and calls to action that only help companies like Disney and Universal which have been the enemies of a free culture and artistic expression for time immemorial, ideas which will only lend power to forces that have been, and with their legitimation, will continue to, make the creative ecosystem worse and give capital more control over ideas. It's not because I want to defend the big GenAI companies – the world would be better if they all died off tomorrow – but because I think there is something deeply valuable at stake if we have a public backlash against free information and open access, especially if that backlash also aligns with, and thus will be backed, by powerful lobbyists and corporations and politicians.

Not to mention the fact that none of this will achieve what they hope: if we force GenAI companies to only train on licensed data and creations, they won't just stop training on people's data and creations, nor will they pay individual artists. They'll just offer huge, lucrative contracts to big content houses like Disney that already take ownership of all the work their artists do, and every possible platform under the sun that artists use to distribute or even make their work, and all that will happen is that all those content houses will take the contracts, and the monetary incentive will motivate every platform and tool to require artists to sign over ownership of their work so that those platforms and tools, too, can take the contracts, and in the end GenAI will end up with the same training data, but in a situation where we've now encoded hardline ownership of rights over information and art, but no artist actually has those rights, only capital does. Not to mention that the need for such lucrative contracts will make any truly open source development of AI, to take away the monopoly that companies like OpenAI have, finally impossible, only solidifying their power.