I'm a game developer, professionally!

You may know me from things like: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, The Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, Gone Home, Bioshock 2, or maybe something else.

Right now I work as a Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy Entertainment in Stockholm, Sweden

Perhaps there are other aspects of my personality that may also be revealed here on this website


Email
johnnemann@dimbulbgames.com
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Johnnemann

Copyright law, unfortunately, is a very powerful weapon that also requires enormous resources to wield effectively. While I think it's clear that training data has probably infringed on smaller artists' works, the end result for "you can sue a company for using your artwork in training" looks like a bad world, to me.

Like the case of "being able to theoretically sue if a website makes shirts or prints of your art", or "Spotify can legally distribute everyone's music" what you'll end up with is a bunch of places taking advantage of smaller artists who don't have the resources to pursue every case, while bigger companies will be protected by their size and tenacity. On the other hand, the big content companies will pursue licensing deals with 'AI' companies, meaning they realize whatever small financial gains there are to be had, and use the tools themselves to devalue workers. You won't be able to protect your art or style from being fed into the machine if you do work-for-hire for the larger media companies. On the other hand, if you as an artist want to use these models, you will have to license them because the content is all locked up by copyright deals.

And then of course, just like you currently have to agree to sell all your personal info to use websites, I can see a license agreement forcing you into training data for using, e.g., Twitter or Reddit. I think that will be a harder sell for more work-intensive contribution sites like DA or Artstation, but I can certainly see casual users agreeing to let their writing and photographs be used for training, because what do they care? And it will be a revenue source for social media sites, like personal data.

I do not know how best to fight this, but I always think copyright law will put more power in the hands of the powerful and take it from the public.