AI : Legalities and Ethics

I felt to write this from ongoing controversies as well as vile behavior and attacks towards me and other long time artists. I am personally a scientist by background (I have a multidisciplinary doctorate and have done fundamental research in biology and physics in India, US and France), I am differently abled with high functioning autism. Due longtime health and PTSD issues I have been living off grid (as much is is practically possible in Goa) for the past years. Although these issues faded out slowly and I find much harmony in life it is indeed impossible to leave all that I have built here now. Most of my work in this period goes in researching instruments, studying meditation, mindfulness, sound healing, pioneering advances in breathwork based music. Visionary art and visuals is something I started at the end of 2013 with jwildfire and mandelbulb3d (2 very challenging programs back then) and have continued dedication and commitment there through whatever means I could with my limited finances and resources, learning different tools like touchdesigner, heavym, shadertoy, resolume along the way. I am fairly active since a decade in some communities and have mentored and inspired some folks in the domains of music, production, VJing, mindfulness and sound healing. As someone interested in emerging tech and being long time aware of the illegal and unethical use of AI in various domains (and specifically social media that literally profited for 2 decades on user data something that is still less of an issue apparently compared to data of artists like me being used in these AI models, apparently even struggling artists like me whose data is used in these models are copycats and thieves, apart from my fractal art I have scores of high res photographs, a mountain of music, videos on the internet, not to mention my scientific articles and personal data all of which is no doubt scraped by various AI models. I actually donot make any commercial profit from AI art and most of my vj packs are available for supercheap to help the community, sure feel free to use it for whatever, actually hardly any independent artist makes much commercial profit from art at all unless they work for big events, corporate projects and clients), I have sought often to dehumanize abstract tools, the heart of any problem is very much human, yet how we generalize and humanize nonliving entities and attack people based on the usage thereof with absolute no dues to empathy and individuality is beyond me.

Leaving this long intro behind, the way forward artist communities must forego this model of relying on facebook and other companies if they are serious about data protection. If they donot secure their own assets and train their own community models on them, this is a wasted opportunity to keep some relevance in a rapidly shifting market. We stand to lose a lot if we donot study and research this ourselves at the deepest level. Finally one cannot deny that non-monetarily driven artists committed to originality and the purity of scientific and artistic expression, finding new domains and innovations with AI, should hardly be the target of attacks, that too on social media which viciously use your data to profit (and train AI models, fb twitter, literally all social media platforms are doing this now, and you will never receive a single dime from it).

Moving on from the deeply loaded aspect of my personal experience and the evolving of ethics, what are the legalities associated currently with AI??

At the beginning of last year I was approached privately by a now public platform for selling and patenting/copyrighting artistic assets leveraging NFTs with traditional art industry networks (galleries, curators, etc). At this time we discussed extensively and determined that pure AI art is not owned by anybody, which is also why anyone can profit from it commercially (since none owns it, ironic I know but ownership and commercial usage are not the even the same thing), it just prevents the human prompter from holding sole rights to the result. However it is subject to the extent of human involvement, postwork/mixed media techniques, curation and most importantly the resemblance of the results to existing copyrighted artworks. Principally also the problem is not that the models have scraped the internet but that they didnot limit their scraping to creative commons and free commercial licensed data or made deals with data owners. The next generation of models are solving this and big companies like OpenAI which did unethical things before will only become more powerful by doing retroactive deals with commercial websites hosting stock assets. So even if the current set of lawsuits are won, it is gameover with the ne generation of models, there would be no real legal grounds against the,, they will only be more powerful and will destroy legally many jobs. If you think these new models will directly pay to struggling artists you are dead wrong (you hardly make much from stock websites or streaming websites as compared to gumroad or bandcamp). These kind of initiatives have to be open source, community and crowd funding based. At least there has to be a better system to run and manage communities which have so much data and expertise in education, training and performance arts. Moving forward I see big threat to communities like VJs, producers if this kneejerk reaction towards AI (an by extension blockchain, which is a different subject altogether) continues. Definitely in the long run usage should be based on offline or alternative non-subscription based systems but there is actually a much bigger issue with AI, it mainly lies in the blackbox manner in which they are trained (this is very tedious and technical so I have linked some research articles on this below on how AI models should be better trained using community consensus and blockchain).
It is a long subject but there is lots written by bigger experts on the subject so I close this here with some relevant links and pointers (it is a crazy world we are heading into lets try to survive it together)
https://www.superside.com/blog/ai-copyright
https://medium.com/@ModulusLabs/chapter-14-the-worlds-1st-on-chain-llm-7e389189f85e
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.04076
https://mirror.xyz/jyu.eth/eMp12YKHFeRg-dmOMHh6q1--3THh0jZAKPfbvmZz8YE
https://hybrowlabs.com/blog/the-key-to-success-combining-ai-blockchain-and-dao
https://medium.com/@sercankoc/integrating-ai-and-blockchain-an-inevitable-approach-to-safeguarding-data-privacy-9c35ac6f9283
https://pec.ac.uk/blog_entries/copyright-protection-in-ai-generated-works/
https://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2017/05/article_0003.html
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-art-copyright-infringement-bytescare-z0u1c/
https://www.iiprd.com/pixels-and-patents-decoding-a-i-art-copyright-law/
https://www.superside.com/blog/ai-copyright