Recently Jon Stewart spoke with journalist Carole Cadwalladr on The Daily Show about the dangers AI pose’s to individual privacy, freedom, and financial livelihoods. (Yes, artists, including ours.) Since the courts always move at a glacial pace and since the administration of the U.S. has included language in its “Big Beautiful Bill” (currently in the Senate) that protects and exempts AI companies from any liability or lawsuits for infringing on copyrights in the creation of their software for at least 10 years … watch and listen. And after, if you’re alarmed or worried, write or call your Senator or Congressperson and express those concerns. (Some of the representatives in Congress have admitted that they hadn’t actually read the bill before they signed it and were surprised to learn of the AI clause: they had one friggin’ job …) AI is here and the Broligarchs are doing everything they can to speed its spread and acceptance regardless of any harm the programs might cause just so they can profit at everyone else’s expense.
But it is not inevitable that they’ll be able to do it without limitations or consequences—note that AI generator Midjourney just got hit with a lawsuit from Disney and Universal—and we definitely don’t have to make it easy for them. “It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end,” while Martin Luther King Jr. said, “We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil.” We don’t have to be complacent. We can and should speak up and speak out. I know I will.
Recent Comments