Milja Moss - December 2024
In the 2020s, there's been increasing momentum in the direction of expanding and enforcing intellectual property rights, and by extension, copyright law. I want to bring up two hotly debated issues: AI-generated content and "react" content.
The latter refers to the practice of online content creators (e.g. YouTubers, Twitch streamers) watching content created by others, and adding their own commentary on top. This practice is commonly criticized as an act of stealing content, and therefore revenue, from the creator being "reacted" to. Another common criticism that goes with this is that the would-be commentator does not actually add anything of value, that a lot of the times the "commentary" amounts to little more than a laugh-track. The audience of the commentator—since they're watching the commentator's stream or video instead of the original—then ends up enriching solely the commentator through the generated ad-revenue or subscriptions. This is a stream of income that, the critics argue, ought to belong to the original creator instead. Or at the very least, that the original creator ought to be compensated in some way.
The criticism directed at AI-generated content, especially when it comes to AI-generated artwork, parallels the criticism directed at react content; the original artists, whose works are part of the AI's training data, do not get compensated for their work. Since generative AI models rely on this training data to function at all, they are criticized as a form of theft. Further, it's equally often said that anyone who uses such a model is engaged in plagiarism.
The commonality here is the very core of the criticism. The argument, at its core, goes: When you create a work of art, you're entitled to compensation whenever your artwork generates value for someone else.
It's quite understandable why such critique exists; the position of artists is becoming increasingly more precarious as working conditions worsen. The fear of being replaced and discarded is not an unfounded one in the least. And the critique seems reasonable at first glance. And more than that, even; it seems fair. If your work is used to generate value, then surely you ought to be given a part of that value? After all, that new value wouldn't exist without your work!
Let's examine what the implications of this notion are. We must take a brief detour to understand how wage labor and private property function.
When you work at a company, let's say as a barista, the "content" you're generating is the output of your work. This ought to be quite self-evident; when you pour drinks, those drinks then have a price that customers pay. From these prices, ultimately, your wage is paid.
A trick is played here, and the trick is called capitalism.
There's a reason you don't immediately get to pocket the five bucks the customer hands you. Instead, you diligently place it in the cash register, and wait for your payday. The sleight of hand at play here is that the owner of the bar gets to take a bit of those five bucks to themselves, or keep it in the company's bank account, or invest it in stocks, or use it to further invest in the bar. Your labor is exploited in this way by the boss. If the bar is doing quite well, they get to simply kick back and relax while you pour the drinks, skimming some off the top every time a transaction happens. This is how capital accumulates, and why owners of companies become rich over time. If you were blissfully unaware of this theft and accumulation happening, you'd be content with your paycheck, erroneously believing that you'd been completely fairly compensated.
The most important thing to notice here is that the boss gets to skim off the top here because they own the bar. Whether the boss is putting their own hard work in pouring drinks or not is irrelevant here. As long as they own the bar, they are at liberty to generate profit from the work of their employees.
The bar is considered private property. That is, the ownership of the bar is in the hands of an owner—a capitalist—and any attempt to remove the owner would be met by the police enforcing the private property rights of the owner. Even—and especially—if the people attempting to remove the owner were disgruntled workers who got tired of being underpaid for their work.
Another way private property can be used to generate profit is through rent-seeking.
In similar fashion to the bar owner, a landlord is someone who gets to generate value for themselves through the mere act of owning private property. A landlord extracts profit in the form of rent, instead of extracting surplus value from a worker's output.
The landlord is an apt thing to consider here, in relation to intellectual property. The landlord gets to extract rent by owning private property (houses), and they can keep doing this because anyone who would seek to depose the landlord would, again, be promptly met with the police stepping in.
Now, in general, landlords do not build the houses they rent with their own two hands. In fact, they're often wealthy to begin with, and merely buy already existing properties.
But let's suppose you did build a house with your own blood, sweat and tears. Let's say that you have immaculate taste, and are a highly skilled artisan and architect. The house is so beautiful it ought to be called a work of art by any metric.
The parallel should be becoming evident. A question now arises: If you decide to not live in the newly built house, are you entitled to then extract rent from anyone who would live there instead, in perpetuity, forever? Or should you instead be fairly compensated for the work you put in to generate this new material wealth?
Herein lies the allure of intellectual private property. The promise being that you, the artist, backed by legal enforcement from the state (in the form of intellectual property laws and copyright), get to effectively extract rent from your works. That whenever someone would find use for the thing you created, a coin ought to clack into your coffer—so that one day you might kick back and relax like the landlord or the owner of that bar can.
Should the artist be granted this special standing in contrast to the wage laborers, who are compelled to make do with the wages they're paid? If an artist gets to hold private property rights over an artwork, why does the barista not get to hold private property rights over the piña colada they poured? How is that fair?
The actual solution to this issue—of theft of intellectual property—is not the expansion of private property rights, but the doing away of the capitalist class who gets to generate profit from ownership. An artist should be fairly compensated for the labor they put into their work, exactly as a construction worker should be paid for the labor they put into building housing. Neither the artist nor the construction worker ought to be entitled to generate money from the finished work beyond the value the work represents to society as a whole.
If an artist was commissioned to do a painting and was paid for it, that's that—they were already compensated. Seeking any further compensation in the form of royalties would be rent-seeking. Same goes for the construction worker.
If an artist shared their work for free, they still do not get to collect rent. An artwork done for fun is not entitled for compensation, even if later transformed by someone else in some way, even if the artist dislikes the transformation (such as react content or AI training data). The artist themselves, should have their material needs met regardless of whether they're making art or not, just as the construction worker should.
And just as the construction worker is not entitled to royalties whenever someone takes a photo of the house, or renders it as a painting, or copies the floorplan, neither is the artist entitled to the value created down the line when their work gets transformed or incorporated into a larger piece.
Intellectual property laws promise to protect artists from precarity, but they fall far short of this promise by not addressing the actual systemic issues.
It's not, however, surprising in the least that artists would feel entitled to some form of continuous compensation. This is, after all, how art was often funded in the past; through patronage, art shows, displays at galleries and so forth. Artists clearly contribute to the social fabric in an essential way, and there must be an economic mechanism in place that allows artists to exist. As such, art has been one of the last bastions of this kind of old-fashioned cottage industry and individual artisanship.
But over time, artistic skill has become a necessity within industries that have not always existed, or have not existed in the same massive scale they do now. The number of artists required to produce big-budget movies or video games is astonishing. The artists working in these industries are wage-laborers just like the barista. The new AI tools are a very real threat to their livelihoods, much more so than it is to the small number of truly independent artists that still exist.
As robots have replaced the assembly line workers, and as tractors put many a farmer out of a job, so is generative AI now driving down the need for artists. As technology marches on, it is always the workers who get the short end of the bargain, so that the owning class gets to keep accumulating wealth.
In tandem with automation, independent artists also face the struggle of market oversaturation. As traditional jobs are increasingly done away with, more and more people are seeking livelihoods in the online content creation sphere. As this happens, it becomes more difficult for any one artist to stand out in the crowd. This is part of why react content is perceived as a threat, the idea being that the eyeballs these commentators captivate ought to be pointed at the artists being reacted to instead. The sense of despair artists have is a fair one, but ultimately that fear and anger is misplaced.
It is not react content that is making conditions unlivable for online artists and creators, but the profit seeking structure of the online platforms themselves. As with AI displacing jobs, the issue is systemic. In order to sell advertisements, these platforms depend on the engagement generated by the creators. Therefore, they incentivize creators to maximize engagement via the sharing of ad revenue in proportion to the engagement generated. This naturally ends up with broadly engaging, easily consumable content to thrive more. As it gets more readily rewarded by the platform, it becomes more viable for people to dedicate working hours to content creation, which ends up drowning out the more niche creators.
The fear of the independent artist, at its core, is one of being relegated to the even more precarious role of the wage laboring artist struggling in increasingly automated industries. And the fears of the wage laboring artist are shared with all wage laborers.
The struggles of artists aren’t unique—they’re the same struggles faced by welders, bus drivers, and baristas. The issue of AI and react-content isn't, at the end of the day, about intellectual property; it's about a system that lets profit flow out of the hands of workers. Expanding intellectual property rights won’t solve this—it simply turns artists into tiny landlords, accumulating wealth through ownership.
The logic of capitalism must be entirely rejected. Artists don’t need royalties; they need fair compensation for their labor, just like anyone else. And they need a society where their material needs are met, regardless of whether they’re making art. The answer isn’t more property laws.
Unionize, organize, collectivize. There’s no easy way out. Artists must join the broader working class in our fight for a society where everyone’s needs are met.
Anger and frustration ought to be directed at bringing the capitalist structure to heel. Breaking of monopolies of online platforms, forming strong artists' unions, and indeed forcing the open-sourcing and democratization of generative AI models and research.