Haha, AI can't do $THING [LWN.net]

Haha, AI can't do $THING

Posted Jun 1, 2026 13:55 UTC (Mon) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: Haha, AI can't do $THING by dskoll
Parent article: Nesbitt: Protestware for coding agents

> Once humans are priced out of the market and stop producing works, what's AI going to be trained on? Other AI output? Let me know how well that works out.

Actually, the interesting thing about art is that humans will produce it even if they don't get paid for it. This is one of the points of Chokepoint Capitalism: that mega-corporations are driving the compensation for artists to zero because artists are going to produce art anyway, even if it costs them money. There are people out there still producing stylised swords even though there is absolutely no demand for them.

We live in a period where an artist can actually make a living just by producing art, it wasn't always so. That this is ending may be inevitable, but the problem is not that the market for art collapses. The problem is that our economic system is setup such that people need to doing stupid jobs (e.g. telephone sanitisers) to get money for basic necessities. We produce more than enough to give everyone a comfortable lifestyle. If we made a serious effort to make sure people didn't have to do stupid jobs to survive (eg UBI) then there will be many people who will sit down and write books all day for free. Because people produce art, it's in their nature. We just don't give people the time to do it.

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Haha, AI can't do $THING

Posted Jun 1, 2026 14:46 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Actually, the interesting thing about art is that humans will produce it even if they don't get paid for it.

Yes, I know. As someone who has been involved in the arts (as a comedian, comedy writer and theatre peformer) for about a decade, I know this only too well, and it's not a good thing. This is what leads to comedians and musicians being pressed to perform for "exposure" and it also depresses the income of everyone, because club and bar owners know they can fill the place just as easily with mediocre, poorly-paid performers as with highly-paid good ones.

And I really don't see a future whereby humans create art for free and then AI rips it off and earns the rippers-off revenue as a fair or ethical one. And while UBI is a nice concept, I can't see it becoming a reality given that the oligarchs in control of AI want everything and don't want to leave anything left over for anyone else.

Haha, AI can't do $THING

Posted Jun 2, 2026 10:16 UTC (Tue) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

> Actually, the interesting thing about art is that humans will produce it even if they don't get paid for it.

Some will. Others more-or-less reluctantly decide that the choice between food on the table and paint on the canvas / chisel on the marble / take-your-pick must by necessity prefer the former.

We might well remember that art pre-dates copyright by quite a bit. We invented copyright because it was deemed to be useful.

Then we extended it, both in duration and reach, beyond the point where public opinion could care less about it. (If a pirated movie is more useful than the official DVD, as the latter contains non-skippable FBI warnings, trailers to unrelated content, and other nonsense, why should I buy it? Why should copyright last a whopping 70 years after the creator's death? etc.etc.etc.)

… and now we have AI and yet another heap of copyright conflagrations. On one side there's pirated text used as training input. On the other side we have copyright zealots who allow people the right to re-mix existing art and create something "new" but deny that a computer can do the same thing with essentially the same input.

No wonder that we don't even speak the same language when we debate this stuff, let alone reach some sort of consensus.