Your application of Harvey's framework to generative AI is brilliant - the distinction between exploitation and expropriation is precisely where the conversation needs to be. The traditional music industry circuit at least maintained the artist as the source of value, creating some leverage even within exploitation. What's terrifying about generative AI is that it severs this dependency permanently. Once creative labour is converted into 'dead labour' embedded in model weights, artists lose both compensation AND control. The 'synthetic data' feedback loop you mention is particularly dystopian - models training on their own output, creating an infinte growth engine that never returns to living creative labour. Your call for equity ownership isn't idealism; it's the only structural intervention that could restore artist agency before they're permanently written out of future cultural production.
"What was once ongoing exploitation becomes outright expropriation: the entire future value contained in artists’ creations can be captured and monetized without their participation, consent, or control."
Spot on!
Thanks for this very poignant piece and all the extra weekend reading through the footnotes •‿•
Your application of Harvey's framework to generative AI is brilliant - the distinction between exploitation and expropriation is precisely where the conversation needs to be. The traditional music industry circuit at least maintained the artist as the source of value, creating some leverage even within exploitation. What's terrifying about generative AI is that it severs this dependency permanently. Once creative labour is converted into 'dead labour' embedded in model weights, artists lose both compensation AND control. The 'synthetic data' feedback loop you mention is particularly dystopian - models training on their own output, creating an infinte growth engine that never returns to living creative labour. Your call for equity ownership isn't idealism; it's the only structural intervention that could restore artist agency before they're permanently written out of future cultural production.
The real winners are the ISPs and Telcos. Tax them accordingly.
We can do that! I can bring artists, managers, labels ——->>>>
I live in Canada where much of our economy is just three telcos in a trenchcoat. Tax (and competition regulation) all day long, please!
Let's set up a lobby :)
"What was once ongoing exploitation becomes outright expropriation: the entire future value contained in artists’ creations can be captured and monetized without their participation, consent, or control."
Spot on!
Thanks for this very poignant piece and all the extra weekend reading through the footnotes •‿•
Ahh thanks so much, Bas! It truly means a lot coming from you <3
And thanks for your original piece (and rall your writing), which achieved the ever important feat of writing: to get others (like me) thinking!
lol enjoy the footnotes (I am constitutionally unable to leave threads hanging, so we get...epic footnotes!)