US involvement was unnecessary in Vietnam because unlike the Koreans, communist Vietnam hated China, and was in no danger of being their ally (puppet.)
Mcnamara actually explained this at some point. That’s why we are allies with Vietnam today and not North Korea.
The problem is really that we live in a system that demands we find commercially exploitable value in almost everything we do. If my main strategy for that involved a skill that generative AI could perfectly copy, including my style by invoking my name, I'd be pissed too.
Not to mention that when it comes to art, I'd rather consume something that someone deemed important and interesting enough to dedicate skill and time to.
>The problem is really that we live in a system that demands we find commercially exploitable value in almost everything we do.
Demands? Almost everything we do? I only spend 40-50 hours a week max doing labor that anybody would reasonably describe as being commercially exploited. No one’s broken down my door demanding I start making money on the visual novel I’m drafting in Ren’Py on the weekends, nor have I been castigated by my peers for throwing a party without charging an entrance fee.
Far from a universal experience though. People who rely on art to survive right now. People who don't have the energy to do more "productive" work on weekends. And those that work weekends to survive because they don't make a living wage.
There's plenty of commercially exploitable value in knowing that something was hand-crafted or even just endorsed by someone famous and impressive, and is not just a second-rate, mass-market knockoff. AI doesn't change that in any way. If it means that celebrated artists can now create even better art on an even broader scale, that's a commercial win for them. Plagiarism would not be an issue at all.
When it comes to art, I'd rather consume something that is interesting/meaningful/beautiful/revolutionary/etc. It's all about the thing itself; it has always been. Less ego in all of this could actually be a good thing.
I don't think I disagree strongly. But I also don't think generative AI tools will do that just based on how they're built. Everything they can do, someone probably did better from scratch.
Every artist of worth has sought two things: to bring something of beauty into the world, and to be regarded in their worth in proportion to the greatness of their art. You suggest we take from them the beauty they have brought forth, and leave them with nothing in return but scorn. What then has the artist to gain from their endeavors, when not only are they the be ridden of the significance of their authorship, but that then their works are to be put to use to feed the all consuming machine which benefits not the artist but those running the machine?
Art is not just about the thing produced, stripped of its context and significance, and forced to be interpreted by ignorant minds who, in their ignorance, consider themselves capable of deriving meaning of value out of words and pictures they can scarcely comprehend from their own limited perspective.
The significance of all art is derived from its historical context, the authors implicit intentions and mode of creation, and the unique experience generated from an individual consuming the art. If you suggest only the consumers experience matters, then you are free to forgo the greater appreciation of art in favor of the lessened experience of it if you wish. For greater awareness and understanding of the details of the parts allow us to better understand the significance of the whole. Only art that is of little value is lessened by our deepened understanding of it.
> Not to mention that when it comes to art, I'd rather consume something that someone deemed important and interesting enough to dedicate skill and time to.
As would I, and we are welcome to. That doesn’t mean alternatives must be eliminated.
I agree with you that the ultimate issue is the surrounding capitalist system. But that means solutions need to address the actual problem, the system, and not the symptom, the technology.
There's a forced reframing going on of what it means to be an artist, and what it means to appreciate artistry. Over time we've developed the idea that art, once created, is not free for the observing; the artist has a right to compensation.
It's an understandable position for these reasons:
- We like art and we ant to show our support and appreciation for art
- The most straightforward way to show support and appreciation for art is to give the artist money
- Much of the art we appreciate was only possible due to the promise of monetary gain on the part of the artist
But there are some old, unavoidable questions:
- At what point does the pursuit of monetary gain begin to diminish one's own artistic expression?
- At what point does the pursuit of monetary gain begin to diminish other peoples' artistic expression?
As you point out, there is no art without appropriation and re-creation.
And now there are some new, unavoidable facts:
- Appropriation is becoming easier
- Attribution is therefore becoming more difficult
- Compensation is therefore becoming more difficult
- Rewinding the clock is impossible
The only way out of this would be for humanity to collectively take a puritanical stance on art, where any form of appropriation is demonized. I think this would make art suck.
This kind of “oh everybody does it” dismissiveness towards cultural appropriation comes off as possibly ignorant but awfully insensitive. What is your understanding of the term? What does it describe, and when people use it as a negative, what legitimate issues are they concerned about?
I think the obsession with making much of all communication a capital asset treats a basic human behavior as theft. Imitation, remixing, and borrowing are a fundamental part of human communication. Copyright serves the interests of capital, not culture.
> “Cultural appropriation” and other knock off terms are objectively a part of every creative and functional cycle.
You'd think it was more complicated than that if the people who were doing a caricature of you had enslaved and murdered your family, and lived in the house your family built while you lived on the street.
It doesn't matter, because culture works how it works (and is often used as a political tool), and somehow world culture ends up being people pretending to be Americans pretending to be the descendants of American slaves. But it's undeniably ugly.
Every generation throughout time didn't have to compete with massive instant access to everything ever written to facilitate plagiarism, or with AI generated slop...
And everything wasn't "content", nor did they have massive numbers of influencers and public content creators, nor was there was a push even for laymen to churn heaps of text every day or to project an image to the whole world.
And until recently if you got caught plagiarizing you were shamed or even fired from journalism. Now it's just business as usual...
"Cultural appropriation" is a totally separate issue to intellectual property and copyright. You're muddying the waters by conflating the two.
Cultural appropriation was a term popularised in the heady days of woke excesses when white liberals were desperate to find reasons to be mad at one another for perceived impurity. It's a ludicrous concept from top to bottom.
Intellectual property laws, in my opinion, have a place in our society.
They are both predicated on the concept of ownership of ideas. The reason IP law seems reasonable and cultural appropriation doesn’t is simply a matter of conditioning, not because one is inherently less nonsensical than the other.
Mcnamara actually explained this at some point. That’s why we are allies with Vietnam today and not North Korea.
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