Disney sues AI image generator Midjourney

I'll just quote a tumblr post here that I just saw. You really shouldn't root for them.

swordandscytheandpen:

You really, really don't need to be cheerleading Disney and Universal here. It honestly doesn't matter how much you dislike AI art — if the court rules in favor of the corporations, the implicit expansion of copyright law will do a million times more harm to the arts than fucking Midjourney ever could.

Like. There is no definition of copyright that does not permit AI training, but does permit fanworks. The latter is much more clearly derivative than the former. You do fanart? Fanfic? Disney's pointing a gun squarely at your head and you're cheering because it might hit the AI artists behind you too.

And beyond that, do you know what happens to AI generation if Disney/Universal win this? They aren't opposed to the technology in principle! They'll be able to use their exclusive rights to a vast corpus of art to make their own AI, for their own purposes. Who does this help? Companies who want to reduce employment costs and disenfranchise the working artist. Who does this hurt? Well, it hurts independent AI users. Congrats, your anxiety over commission prices is gone now, not that it was well-founded to begin with. It also hurts anyone who wants to make use of fair use doctrine forever, so I hope none of what you were selling was fanart of copyrighted characters.

I've never made a secret of being rather more open to generative AI as a technology than most people in these online spheres. But for fuck's sake, you really don't need to like AI to realize that this lawsuit's success would be a terrible thing to happen to art! If you've found yourself on the same side as Disney, that should be a clue that you might wanna review your thinking!

We need some form of copyright otherwise if you make some content nothing would stop people from selling it and keeping the money for themselves. But it doesn't need to last nearly as long as it does currently.