The American Matthew Butterick has started a legal crusade against generative artificial intelligence (AI). In 2022, he filed the first lawsuit in the history of this field against Microsoft, one of the companies that develop these types of tools (GitHub Copilot). Today, he’s coordinating four class action lawsuits that bring together complaints filed by programmers, artists and writers.
If successful, he could force the companies responsible for applications such as ChatGPT or Midjourney to compensate thousands of creators. They may even have to retire their algorithms and retrain them with databases that don’t infringe on intellectual property rights.
Luddites smashing power looms.
It’s worth remembering that the Luddites were not against technology. They were against technology that replaced workers, without compensating them for the loss, so the owners of the technology could profit.
Moreover, Luddites were opposed to the replacement of independent at-home workers by oppressed factory child labourers. Much like OpenAI aims to replace creative professionals by an army of precarious poorly paid microworkers.
Yep! And it’s not like a lot of creative professionals are paid all that well right now. The tech and finance industries do not value creatives.
“Starving artist”
Obviously I can’t speak for all countries, but in mine, an artist and a programmer with the same years of experience working for the same company will not be getting the same salary, despite the fact that neither could do the other’s job. One of those salaries will be slightly above minimum wage (which is currently lower than the wage needed to cover the cost of living), and the other will be around double the national average wage. So there are in fact artists using food banks right now, and it’s not because the creatives aren’t working as hard as the tech professionals. One is simply valued higher than the other.
Meritocracy is a myth used to control people.