Much love for Wake Up Dead Man from The Crest theater in the Seattle area! Packed house, sold out all weekend. (Was too polite to take a crowd photo but here’s the marquee.)

Gonna catch myself here: if I believe genAI disempowers artists at scale by training on and displacing art, I should oppose training on public domain works, and/or shortening copyright terms. I think I merely mean to say training on PD is obv not traditional infringement and difficult to oppose.

(I would use softer language throughout except for Bluesky's character limit. 😅 ty for posing the question in earnest, and encouraging discussion!)

My incomplete belief is that genAI training is an all-new kind of copyright violation that ought to be recognized by law.

I simultaneously hold that existing copyright law is over-extended. More works should be in the public domain, I do not oppose genAI training on public domain works.

I'd argue that the former modestly and briefly empowers the infringer without necessarily disempowering the artist, while the latter grossly empowers the infringer and disempowers many artists at scale. Legal tort/case law is not the conveyor of moral value, esp wrt copyright.

I otherwise agree with replies about transitive stigma: your joke slide uses genAI, so you might also be using it for other things. Recognizable use of genAI for any purpose demands more critical attention of the entire presentation, with less reason to believe that effort would be rewarded. /end

I'm sure genAI images will become less recognizably so over time, and maybe they replace clipart (illicit or otherwise). I also expect mash-up culture to fade in the presence of these tools—but not necessarily be replaced by them. I'm not sure what the next cultural shift will be. 3/

The power dynamics between these cases are *very* different: one is me stealing your photo for five seconds to impress a room full of people, the other is a massive tech corporation stealing everyone's photos to make photos obsolete in favor of their product, with my complicity. 2/

The question compares the moral hazard of stealing someone's work for this style of Internet-enabled low-effort collage for punching up presentations, vs. using genAI trained on the same works for the same purpose. I'm not sure this hazard is front of mind when a genAI image sours a presentation. 1/

I distinctly remember No Time To Die had a “James Bond will return” title card at the end of the credits. It’s fine.