It's disturbing how much of what the anti-AI people call for mirrors Mussolini's Italy. The Ministry of Popular Culture had authority over all public communication of art. If the anti-AI mob has their way, we'll be in exactly the same situation here. 🧵 In particular, a 1941 Copyright Law established "moral rights", chaining writers and artists to Fascist corporations and tying creative endeavors to what were essentially cartels.

They had previously done something similar in 1933 with recording and broadcasting. 2/6

And thinking about this further, here's the situation I'm worried about:

As I've elucidated several times, fair use is the First Amendment side of the divide between free speech and Article I.8.8. 1/13

https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1945578635278061765

Yes, fair use is a FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHT, which NO authority should infringe upon, no matter what copyright hawks like Neil Turkewitz try to say. It's there to protect the copyright cartels from running roughshod over us. 2/13

There are two kinds of art: art you make to make a living, and art you make for art's sake.

IP is about neither of these. Copyright is inhibiting to the former and destructive to the latter. 🧵 When I make art to make a living, I am merely a humble tradesperson: I ply my skills to earn a paycheck. I'm not vain or narcissistic enough to think I'm doing anything more important than that, and so I don't feel I need IP protection. 2/12

Everything we're seeing with the anti-AI movement is just the most recent culmination of this century's trend: big content cartels doing everything they can to suppress the rest of us to preserve their outdated, obsolete business model. 🧵 And they began doing this long before AI came on the scene. Before then, they had an even bigger threat that put their entire business model in jeopardy.

It was called the Internet. 2/22

Let's talk about Poe's Law.

Nathan Poe observed: "It is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article."

Wired said in 2017: "Poe's Law applies to more and more internet interactions." 🧵 I think the spirit of Poe's Law is that the people being lampooned have become so ridiculous they've become parodies of themselves.

I *don't* think it's people just being stupid and *calling* it parody, making themselves indistinguishable from their targets. 2/7

Let me see if I can explain this clearly, because there are apparently a lot of soft-brained socialist twits out there who can't understand it: 🧵

https://twitter.com/iamAtheistGirl/status/1840906736766488673

If you're forced to pay protection money to the Mafia so nothing bad will happen to your business, and something bad happens to your business, you are perfectly within your rights to demand they keep their end of the bargain. That is NOT the same as wanting the Mafia!

Now that it's #PublicDomain Day 2024 and #MickeyMouse is PD, I have to say that it should be obvious to everyone that copyright has gotten absolutely ridiculous. We should go back to a copyright term of 28 or even the original 14 years. 1/6 It used to be the case that a new creation could become PD within one's own lifetime; that was the period of our greatest creative outpouring, where Disney used fairy tales, Universal used horror novels such as Dracula and Frankenstein, etc., resulting in a heyday. 2/6

@SpudFella @KylesRealTalk @ecutruin @Sometweets25471 @shadmbrooks Are you REALLY going to make me explain this in detail when you could just look it up yourself???

As I showed, if you give a model no prompts whatsoever, it'll create something, at random, differing on the model itself and the seed. 1/9 @SpudFella @KylesRealTalk @ecutruin @Sometweets25471 @shadmbrooks With your prompt, there is a broad set of images that could conform to it. You are trying to pull the AI into that conformity. The level of detail is ENTIRELY up to you (yet another CREATIVE CHOICE!). 2/9

I want everyone to think about this. Because this chucklehead is FAR from the only one calling for this.

He wants to make WHAT YOU DO ON YOUR OWN COMPUTER ILLEGAL. 🧵

https://twitter.com/whotingus/status/1723834719698030709

He wants government to REACH INSIDE YOUR HOME, and REACH INSIDE YOUR MACHINE, to stop you from running software on it that he doesn't like.

Do you grok this? To say that he's an elitist gatekeeper is putting it mildly—he's a LITERAL fascist! 2/7

The fearmongering about AI is the exact same fearmongering that power-hungry narcissists give about every other subject: only THEY can be trusted, when they're the ones we should probably trust the least! 🧵 Governments have always been like this: you have to be disarmed, your decisions about the products you're allowed to buy put into their hands, and even determining what you can put into your own home.

When we're having this conversation, it's important to understand exactly WHY interest rates go up when this sort of thing happens. 🧵 1/9

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1634949921576218625

When the Fed pulls back on assets (even what Powell is doing right now: just letting some assets mature instead of rolling over more debt), there's nothing that *per se* causes interest rates to rise because of it. 2/9