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They stole my voice with AI | Jeff Geerling
(www.jeffgeerling.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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No. I am talking about rent-seeking.
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
You could argue to what a degree landlords or Elon Musk are engaged in rent-seeking. Likeness rights are a clear example, though.
Imagine in the near future. Some famous person licenses their likeness for a show, game, movie. Maybe the producer hires an unknown actor that is then digitally altered into the famous person, like a more advanced version of Gollum. Or maybe the VFX artists can do it on their own. These guys work. The famous person does nothing. They might be dead, while the rights-owners still collect license fees.
Oh! I see. We are starting from very different places on looking at the situation. I see one's likeness as a part of their identity that they have a fundamental right as a human being to agency over. I place it in a similar category to one's labor - can exercising one's agency over their body really be considered "rent-seeking"?
I see the uses of AI "plagiarism engines" in arts and creative trades by major corporations as just another way to alienate workers from their labor and exploit them.
By definition, I'd think.
Major respect for VFX artists, stage engineers, and all the trades under IATSE. They do huge amounts of very skilled work. They are the foundation on which all modern media rests and I'm glad that a greater share of them have unionized.
Here, I think, is a bit that I do agree with you on. One's likeness should never be able to be owned by anyone else. Die and it's public domain. Just like the ridiculous copyright terms that Disney secured, the idea of one's likeness outlasting their life, let alone someone else having agency over it is preposterous.
The scenario that you propose is part of why unions exist in the first place. SAG-AFTRA hasn't been doing amazingly on the subject but, they're definitely doing more than about any union that I've seen in relation to AI impacting a trade and making it more susceptible exploitation. I would suggest that in your scenario, both actors (and the producer) are acting in an unethical manner. The famous actor is pulling up the ladder behind them, not giving the junior actor the opportunity to gain prestige in their trade. The junior actor is participating in exploitation that should be grounds to strike the production. The producer is using the licensed likeness as leverage to pay and credit the junior actor less.
The situation should not happen and, if SAG-AFTRA allows it, actors should form a new union that treats all of its members when respect.
First of all, I am not impressed by this kind of emotional manipulation. You are talking about exercising agency, power, over other people's bodies. If someone, whether a VFX artist or a hobbyist, would use a likeness without a license, you want them stopped. At the end of the day that means that LEOs will use physical force. You may not think of something like copyright being enforced through physical force, but that is what happens if someone steadfastly refuses to pay fines or damages.
Enforcing intellectual property, like a likeness right, means ultimately exercising power over other people's bodies. The body whose likeness it is, may not be involved at all. In the typical case of a Hollywood star, they would be completely unaware of what the enforcers are doing.
Rent-seeking is an economics term. Rent-seeking is as rent-seeking does. You may feel that society - the common people -have to suffer for "justice", like people were expected to suffer for the diving rights of kings. But you can't expect people not to remark the negative consequences. Well, I guess if I were living in such a monarchy, subject to the divine right of a king, I would be quite circumspect. I wouldn't want to be tortured or imprisoned, after all. And yet it moves.
Usually, rent-seeking involves property, and yet the right to own property is internationally recognized as a human right.
We're probably not on the same page regarding terminology. This sounds like a Karl Marx idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Obviously that's not what you mean. I guess I'm just surprised to see these hints of leftism mixed in with conservative economics.
...is fundamentally a conservative organization. It's no coincidence that Ronald Reagan was president of SAG, before becoming president of the US. They will favor the in-group over the out-group and the top over everyone at the bottom. That's what the doctrines you are repeating are designed for.
I promise you that I am not attempting emotional manipulation. We just appear to be coming at this from very different assumptions on the nature of likeness. I see it in relation to one's identity, to which I see it as tightly coupled, where you seem to be approachining it from the perspective that it is an asset or a commodity. We're not talking about taking inspiration from another human being's performance but plagiarism of it and copying their external identity in voice or image, with the express intent of compensating them less (when it comes to the studios).
I don't see how that tracks.
Oh! You seem to be inferring that the hobbyist or VFX artist in this case has a fundamental right to the fruits of an AI-cloned actor's labor, with or without their consent. I cannot agree with that. By that reasoning, enforcing laws against fraud, forgery, and identity theft is exerting power over the would-be forger or identity thief by preventing them from assuming the victim's identity and draining their savings.
I do not see it primarily as an intellectual property issue (though there are definitely significant ethical issues related to IP in LLMs/plagiarism engines). I see it as an identity and labor issue. The studios and producers are pushing for the tech because they want to exploit people. VFX artists included.
Oh, it very much is. By taking away an artist or creative worker's very identity and reselling it, those marketing and leveraging these models are alienating these workers from their labor and their own means of production. Intellectual workers and creatives are still workers; cut one and we all bleed.
Not only that, those selling access to the myself are literally participating in rent-seeking for an amalgam of creative workers' stolen labor. Are IP laws fucked? Absolutely. Do they and identity protection laws and systems need to be overhauled to be able to handle modern challenges and technology? Yup. Does supporting corpos in their exploitation of fellow workers because a tiny percentage of them are disgustingly wealthy help anyone but the ultra-wealthy? Nope.
Is this a "everyone who doesn't agree with me is a bad guy" bit of ad hominem here? Because I'd really like to see how "workers should be compensated fairly for their labor, not have it stolen and leveraged to exploit other workers" is in any way in line with conservatism.
This is not a statement that meshes with facts. Political contributions from members are so far blue that it's not even close. And that's including the 2008 spike from old rich racists. At worst, there are a lot of neo-libs but there's also a fair number of soc-dems. I've never met any member who felt favorably towards Ronnie the Union-busting shitbag. Beyond that, I've yet to meet a SAG-AFTRA member that is anti-union, while finding someone who is pro-union as a member of a trades union is nearly as rare as finding a unicorn.
There is unjust hierarchy in play, yes. Voice and video game talent, especially, have and continue to be treated as less-thans and where the union should be doing around-the-clock membership drives throughout an industry and pressuring studios to sign union contracts for more productions, they instead, generally, do about fuck-all and are happy to make concessions that "real" screen actors would never face.
I get the feeling that maybe this is less about intellectual property and more about bucket-crabbing and potentially about justification of support of tech that is based upon ethically compromised foundations and is being leveraged as an ethically-devoid weapon against labor, not to the workers' benefit. If you consider yourself a leftist and/or pro-labor, I'd recommend some serious self-reflection because it seems like you have a bit of a hatred for a whole segment of laborers.
Also, to be clear, hobbyists aren't the problematic group in all of this at all. It's the producers and studios leveraging technology to exploit. However, sometimes we all have to do things that we would rather not or give up things that we want because doing otherwise causes measureable harm to others.