Let's say, during hard times when you don't have a job, fans of the game you worked on notice you on twitter and say "hey I loved your work, here's $5 for your patreon." Now you can pay your medical bills this month.
Their livelihood was taken from them. Midjourney is theft.
It's not theft though
It was clear to me over 20 years ago when I realized that I wouldn't be able to earn enough in the arts, and ironically due to creative people sharing so much good content for free.
While I feel for people who didn’t realize this, but it’s no surprise if you try to earn your living by adding digital content to the global network of computer systems that something like the current AI trend was bound to happen.
If you love art - paint a painting, make a sculpture, perform in a play, perform live music, dance, etc. Digital is a dead-end goal in and of itself.
Not all of us participate in the form of thought control that has been euphemistically pushed as "intellectual property."
Anyway, I don't think there's much I can say to change your mind - talk to other artists, especially those who are artists as their main hustle.
Main gig, although of course the sands are shifting rapidly with regard to what that means, for precisely the reasons this conversation is so stimulating.
> Your new album is a bop.
Jeez man that's a nice thing to say. I'm really proud of it. We worked really hard on it. It has been fascinating to see and hear the responses; the story that I tell is one of "open source" and "traditional" having roughly the same meanings as applied to the intellectual property frameworks surrounding them.
I'm curious to hear what you might think of the album played in this order; I think it gives a darker and more contemplative perspective:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2ucmjLc88iZdfKi9zlU5HP
> talk to other artists, especially those who are artists as their main hustle.
As you can see from the ensemble on my record, I've become friendly with a good chunk of the mainstream bluegrass world (which is a fairly tight-knit community). I think that a lot of artists are just very frustrated with the system as it is, where they are pitted against their own fans (or whomever wants to simply download and listen to their music) with the industry acting decidedly as a middle-man.
I am reasonably (but not totally) confident that musicians, and particularly purveyors of what have come to be called "the traditionals", will be among the main forces seeking to dismantle the IP system in the next couple of decades.
But I certainly think that the casting the act of copying bytes from one medium to another as "theft" is propagandistic and dishonest.
Because . . . they're not creating value with their code. It took them years to learn how to code well. All that effort should be contributed to the world for free.
I mean, there is a plethora of open source work that is actually contributed to the world for free, right?