Ok grandpa, time to take your meds, they’ll help keep all the imaginary doomers away.

I live in Australia where we thankfully have better democratic voting systems and as a result lean far further into social benefit and developed social services, but we’re already struggling with underemployment where efficiency is outstripping the demand for bodies. The one benefit we have is one of the best unemployment support systems in the world, but we still have issues where the capitalists that are exploiting us for all their profit don’t want to use that money to pay for those social services that keep the society that supports them healthy, and I dare say they’ll want to pay even less when they have less employees doing the same work. I agree that UBI needs to be implemented, and some of the Nordic countries have already successfully trialled both UBI and further reduced working hours for same pay with the 4 day work week and the 32 hour full time week. The only real issue is that the one entity that needs to be aware that these things exist and are beneficial is the social consciousness, and it’s stupid, we don’t spend enough on education even here to make the social consciousness cognizant enough to act. People like to think they are individual and I fear American individuality has been weaponised against the populace for so long that the tide can’t turn without blood. The strikes are starting, the people are unionising, we’ll see how far the people can push before the corporations kick back and make them bleed, then we’ll see if the American social consciousness is resilient enough to fight back and start claiming significant workers rights or whether they’ll reel back covering their bloody mouth with their shackled hands. I fear they will fight for more than they have but not for what they deserve.

That’s a capitalism problem. In a socialised system we’d all be getting paid UBI and able to contribute our free time to learning these skill sets and contributing to the development of related products out of sheer interest alone without needing to append the yoke of exploitation required to rustle up a profit for someone else so we can have crumbs to eat instead of recieving fair value for our work. Or since we cant magic society into social advancement… we can make use of these FOSS tools that utilise these systems to give the power to create back to the normal person who can now use these tools (as I do) to enhance their already existing workflows to improve their capacity to earn value from their own merit and ability without taking anything from those who have contributed. It’s a shift in dynamic and people are naturally resistant to change, I don’t hold such adamant perceptions of ownership of knowledge even if one can have ownership of a product.

Capitalist structures will always under every single circumstance try to maximise efficiency, maximise output, and minimise cost. Be that labour cost or materials cost or production cost. This is why Capitalism is unsustainable, the one directional flow of wealth and value from all of the technological contributions of everyone in humanity into the hands of the few. And don’t even try to tell me “Oh but people need to get paid their fair share for their contributions” yes, yes they damn well do, but that can’t happen under a corporation because for a profit margin to exist the worker must be exploited to create something of more value than they are offered in return, so expecting fairness in an unfair system is barking up the wrong tree and has no bearing on the value given back to the artist by FOSS tools that fools would fight against and burn to the ground only to the benefit of the very corporate slave owners who prevent their artistic capacity from being viable for income generation. Guess who can afford to pay the artists when the pool of data gets poisoned? Not the people, not the producers, not the individual artist. Nope. But the Corporation can, and when they have to they will. Fuck the rest of us. These people in the article are capitalist cyber terrorists, but fear of “AI” blinds the ignorant, and the masses will suffer for it, and their art will gain no more value because it has not gained any more practical merit, except to those willing to pay enough to exploit them some more, just to gatekeep their own perceived position in their perceived hierarchy of value.

So if I have legal access to view it, I have consent to lend that capacity to someone else?

Isn’t that what you do when you use your eyes to view the image? Indiscriminately absorb it into your black box? Consent was provided through publishing.

Just as they did when they replaced sketch artists with photographers, and traditional artists with digital artists, pen and paper for Photoshop. We print advertising now, not paint it. Stable Diffusion won’t kill Photoshop, I use both. Just like Photoshop didn’t kill traditional art, and just like photography didn’t kill sketch artistry. But for the purposes of mass production the practicality of producing higher quality products faster will never not be sought after because time is finite.

The art doesn’t go away, but the tools available to the artist change.

Does an author get to request consent before you read their book? Or is consent implied because they published it?