The AI Age’s Multifaceted Theft
The AI Age’s Multifaceted Theft
ever heard of cultural appropriation? It’s when individuals of the majority culture exploit minority cultural aspects without understanding, respecting, or acknowledging its context and importance. Exploiting traditions, conventions, dress, symbolism, language, or art is possible.
Black music is white gold.
Even if we limit cultural appropriation to 20th-century music, white artists gained mainstream popularity and financial gain from Black artists’ genres, often without credit.
Western popular music is likely cultural appropriation. Are Elvis, Led Zeppelin, and Vanilla Ice responsible? No, they worked in an industry and capitalist system that fine-tuned extraction without proper pay.
AI corporations—where do they fit?
Consider broadening the scope… Exactly what is appropriation? Just theft? Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have used internet-scraped words and pictures in their generative AI datasets. Many US lawsuits allege that the aforementioned firms (and others) violated copyright law by consuming copyrighted material. Is this stealing or appropriation?
Appropriation is stealing something without permission and claiming it as your own. It’s worse than thievery. Mona Lisa theft is one thing. Stealing and claiming you painted it is different. AI image generators and Large Language Model chatbots do this.
A whole creative style vanished.
The only method to create these photos is to request ChatGPT to make a Ghibli rendition of a photo. OpenAI believes the result is a copyright-free artwork that the user may share. This may have been cultural appropriation if Studio Ghibli wasn’t owned by a dominant-culture business. Ghibli is only one well-known example. AI allows anybody to appropriate culture with a few keyboard clicks.
