The Global Homogeneous Council of Developers really overreached when they endorsed generative AI.
- Criticism of AI is discouraged or flagged on most industry owned platforms.
- The loudest pro-AI software engineers work for companies that financially benefit from AI.
- Many are silent because they fear reprisals.
- Many software engineers lack agency and prefer to sit back and understand what is happening instead of shaping what is happening.
- Many software engineers are politically naive and easily exploited.
Artists have a broader view and are often not employed by the perpetrators of the theft.
What causes comments to disappear? Is that what flagging does?
- "Artists have always been exploited" (patently false since at least 1950, it was a symbiosis with the industry).
- "Humans have always done $X".
- "You are a Luddite."
- "This is inevitable."
Customers usually can figure out when a product is shitty software, but shitty art, well that's a bit harder for people to judge.
Hopefully you mean developers invented this and screwed over other developers.
How many folks working on the code at OpenAI have meaninfully contributed to Open Source? I agree that because it is the same "job title" people might feel less sympathy but it's not the same people.
Art can't be generated. We can only generate artefacts mimicking art styles. So far we have no AI generated images that are considered actual Art, because Art's purpose is to express the artist's intent. And when there is no artist, there is no intent.
I have to stop now, but I guess you can see where I'm going with this.
Art is not just about beauty, it is about expressing the mind (feelings, experience etc) of the author. AI will never do that (except if it learns to express its own experiences, which would be art, but not something competing with human art; it would be like if we had contact with alien art).
Code can be art the same way writing can be. There's a big difference between artistic code and business code, the same way there's a big difference between poetry and a comment chain on hacker news.
Your comparison is incorrect.
This has not been generally true IME. It follows the same pattern as code quite often.
When you pay an artist for their work, many times you also acquire copyright for it. For example if you hire someone to build you a company logo, or art for your website, etc the paying company owns it, not the artist.
In-house/employee artists are much more common than indies, and they also don't own their own output unless there's a very special deal in place.
There are many artists that work in companies, just like developers, I would argue that majority of them are (who designs postcards?)
From a common FOSS contributor license...
>>permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions...
https://opensource.org/license/mit
... As opposed to a visual artist who has signed away zero rights prior to thier work being scraped for AI training. FOSS contributors can quibble about conditions but they have agreed to bulk sharing whereas visual artists have not.
Stealing from FOSS is awful, because it completely violates the social contract under which that code was shared.