But sometimes your work is put on Instagram without your knowledge or consent (eg by an Instagram aggregator account)

And this whole ecosystem of credit (or not sharing credit) is undoubtedly encouraged by Instagram (because it's valuable to me to have an Instagram account with many followers)

>But sometimes your work is put on Instagram without your knowledge or consent (eg by an Instagram aggregator account)

That's copyright infringement. You can't claim to own other people's work and then give license to others to use when you don't own the work.

Of course it is! It being illegal doesn't mean Instagram is incentivized to crack down on it

And if you're a tiny independent artist you also aren't well-resourced to do anything about it.

(Afaict the best thing we can do is maintain a culture that demands attribution)

I represent tiny independent artists and the best thing you can do is hope that some moneyed media company infringes your work. They never have an excuse and they always pay up.

But that's not what happens on Instagram

This isn't like some TV ad using a song they forgot to license

I've recovered for uses on Instagram

Sure, but it is quite difficult to prove your work was used in the models and it is also quite expensive legally while being very time consuming. So in practice does it matter? I still believe in presumption of innocence, but that isn't to say that it can't be exploited and that the system itself is expensive (monetarily and temporally). I think you're just oversimplifying the issue and dismissing before considering any nuance.

what am I dismissing? I think these AI companies are stealing these works. Nerds here are equivocating the creation of art with what LLM output, simply out of their own inexperience making art. It's terrible and I hate it.

I believe I misinterpreted, it sounded like you were just suggesting it was copyright and thus could empower the artist to sue the companies. As if the process was rather straightforward and thus the fault on the artist for not pursuing. I'll admit that I'm primed by other comments which do express this sentiment explicitly. Sorry if I misunderstood.

Is that boundary something that the internet is likely to be able to recognize or enforce though? In 100 years? In 500?

What are we building for here?

If the boundary isn't enforced you'll likely see art move increasingly to a patronage system, whereby a select elite will get to choose what art is suitable for your consumption. Maybe you'll like that, maybe you won't.

> you'll likely see art move increasingly to a patronage system

It is?

But also this is dismissive without understanding either system at play. Traditional art has galleries because no one wants to buy art that they haven't seen. But this creates a problem if our galleries are on the internet. It no longer matters how much you attempt to stop a user from downloading or copying the art, they still can. We even see efforts to watermark art on public posting but we also see efforts to remove the watermarks. It's very clear to me that this is becoming a more complex time to be an artist than it was, say 5 years ago. Maybe better than 100 years ago, but that would be ridiculous to compare to as we'd have to get into an argument about the point of societies and if a goal is to make life better.

Strangely this is something some in the NFT crowd were attempting to solve. We can all agree that there were lots of scams (I'd even say dominated by scams and grifting) in the area and that there was poor execution of even good faith attempts, but I'm just trying to say that this was motivation for sum. They weren't even trying to solve as difficult of a problem, they were just trying to solve the problem of proof of ownership. It's not like you can use timestamps or public/private key pairs for proof. It still wouldn't even solve the problem of redistribution or training. It wouldn't prevent someone from even buying the art and training on it even if the artist specified that that was against the TOS (a whole other philosophical debate about TOS and physical ownership that I don't want to get into).

I think you're simplifying the problem and being ready to dismiss without adequately demonstrating an understanding of the issues and environment. I don't know what the answer is but I sure as hell know it is a lot more complex than "let the 'free market' run its course".

We have a patronage system today. See: services like patreon

I think it depends in large part on how the moving parts interact.

If the emergence of automata and internet creatures also means that people can spend more of their time doing what makes them happy, and if people doing that results in amazing art and music emerging, then I don't think that the purvey of selection will be so dangerously cornered by an elite.

But it's up to us to do the work to build that future.

you mean, is the right of an individual human to property and the rule of law be recognized in 100 or 500 years?

hopefully yes, unless you foresee some inescapable transfer to dictatorship, which you'll have to argue for to maintain your argument

I meant something softer and simpler, like power structures which somehow convince learning machines to avert their gaze when media from a forbidden domain appears.

That just doesn't seem like the direction of the internet to me.

As for the rule of law, it seems that what we're talking about here is what authority can be capable of supplying the law. I highly doubt that a confusing and contradictory set of mandates from nation states will continue to be "the law" on the internet.