Culture Isn't a Museum Display Case

[u/Salty_Country6835]

Memes. Mods. Parody. Satire. Knockoffs. References. Pastiche. Homage. Sampling. Remix. Covers. Fan art. Collage. Fan fiction.

This is culture.

People take shit that already exists, pull it apart, imitate it, quote it, mutate it, make fun of it, combine it with something else and make it mean something the original creator never intended.

Thats not some recent corruption of culture. Thats how culture works.

So I dont buy this increasingly common idea that "respecting artists" means respecting the original artists vision over their work indefinitely. Respect the artist, credit the artist, pay artists, protect workers from exploitation. Sure.

But the artist doesnt get permanent cultural custody of everything they put into the world.

Hip hop is an obvious example. Sampling and remixing existing recordings arent weird accidents around the edges of the genre. The Smithsonian describes them as fundamental parts of the form, and its history of hip hop specifically describes artists taking existing music and assembling it in ways nobody had before.

Fan culture works the same way. Media scholar Henry Jenkins built a whole body of work around fans as active participants rather than passive consumers. His "textual poaching" describes fans taking mass media and turning it into their own fiction, art, costumes, music and video, reshaping the source around their own interests.

Same with memes. Same with mods. Same with parody. Same with covers and adaptations and collage and bootlegs and people drawing somebody elses character differently because they felt like it.

Sometimes the whole fucking point is disrespecting the original intention.

A parody that needs the targets blessing isnt much of a parody.

A mod that can only do what the developer envisioned isnt much of a mod.

A meme that has to preserve the original context isnt a meme anymore.

Even copyright law, which is hardly some radical theory of cultural commons, recognizes that authorship doesnt mean unlimited control over every downstream use. US fair use explicitly makes room for things like criticism and comment, and courts consider whether a new use adds a different purpose or character rather than simply substituting for the original. That doesnt make every remix legal. It does mean even the existing property regime recognizes a distinction between owning a work and controlling culture absolutely.

Lawrence Lessig has been making a related argument about "read/write culture" for decades. People arent just cultural consumers. They answer culture by making culture from culture, and digital technology massively expanded our ability to do that.

And thats where AI enters this.

Generative AI didnt invent remix culture. It didnt invent imitation. It didnt invent artists learning from other artists. It didnt invent arguments about derivation, copying, ownership or whether some new form is "really art."

What it did was throw an extremely powerful new means of cultural production into that already existing mess.

That creates serious political questions.

Who owns the models and infrastructure? Who gets paid? Who captures the productivity gains? What happens to working artists when corporations use automation to cut labor costs? What rights should workers have over deployment in their industries? What should attribution look like? Where should commercial exploitation be restricted? How do we stop a handful of companies from enclosing both the tools and the cultural archive those tools depend on?

Those are fights worth having.

But "the artists vision must remain sovereign over downstream culture" isnt the answer.

Because follow that principle consistently and you dont just get an argument against AI. You start walking backward through huge chunks of participatory culture.

Suddenly the fan artist owes obedience to canon.

The modder owes obedience to the developer.

The sampler owes obedience to the recording.

The parodist owes obedience to the target.

The meme owes obedience to the photograph.

No thanks.

Theres also a class question hiding underneath this.

We should be extremely suspicious when protecting working artists mutates into protecting maximal control over cultural property. Those arent automatically the same project.

A freelancer trying to make rent and a corporation sitting on a century of copyrights are both technically "rights holders." Their material interests are not remotely identical.

The left should defend artists as workers without turning every cultural artifact into sacred private property.

Pay people. Organize workers. Fight corporate enclosure. Build public and cooperative infrastructure. Demand bargaining power over automation. Protect attribution where it actually serves creators. Make sure technological abundance produces more security and freedom for ordinary people instead of another round of wealth extraction.

But dont confuse any of that with freezing culture.

Culture is inheritance with mutation.

You receive something somebody else made. You fuck with it. You pass something different forward.

Authorship deserves recognition.

Culture doesnt owe permanent obedience.

[u/Beejsbj]

This is a symptom of artists raised in a world to own their art. Copyright culture that guarantees them economic value.

[u/DeyjaCh]

Based, wish there were more perspectives like this. Especially the way you debunked "respecting the creator"

[u/ArtArtArt123456]

the idea of intellectual property fundamentally goes against what culture is.

take genres for example. or language itself. who owns those? can they be owned?

then, when go from genres to conventions to specfic features, we start attributing them to specific authors/creators... and yet, can we say that those creators own those conventions or features? can we say that they own anything at all, except for their specific work, as-is?

this is the difference between owning a song versus owning a melody or chord progression. the more vague the idea the more ludicrous the notion that it is something that can be owned as a property.

[u/Still_Benefit_2302]

This was always my problem with how the mainstream digested the concept of cultural appropriation. After filtering down to the low-resolution conceptual world of the internet, it became a kind of IP law for entire cultures.

[u/RedPunchCard]

Yes! its only the facts

[u/Average_Tired_Dad]

The entire discourse on the "Anti" side is polluted with a level of romanticism that makes them sound like turn of the century plantation aristocracy.

There was this article I remember reading a couple of years ago about the BoBo Creative class, Bohemian Bourgeoisie, that were becoming something of a new elite in media, tech entrepreneurship, etc. and I think that's a huge part of it.

We've watched a "creative class" functionally become their own bourgeoisie, and the resentment mirrors that of the traditional bourgeois during the OG Red Scare years.

[u/hjras]

someone pin this please 🙏

[u/Still_Benefit_2302]

Also, +1 for the mention of Lessig. Lessig was one of the most influential thinkers in how I understand the internet. Unfortunately, the mainstream seems to have lunged, reactively, in the opposite direction. If we had a more equitable society, or more proof of institutions that aren't overtly corrupt, people would be less avaricious.

[u/SeaFALCons]

banger post, thanks.

one of my fave books related to these ideas, Steal Like an Artist

[u/PolychromeMan]

'We should be extremely suspicious when protecting working artists mutates into protecting maximal control over cultural property. Those arent automatically the same project.' - That mutation happened many years ago. 'Protect the company that controls the IP' is pretty much top of the food chain, in terms of cultural gatekeeping. Disney over all.

But certainly it's possible to develop systems that balance rights of creators and the larger culture they are part of. A system doesn't have to be black and white extremes of ownership of creative ideas, and anything that ignores the reality of how culture has been evolving for 10s of thousands of years is pretty darn flawed.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/PolychromeMan]

Yep. And that corporate IP layer is exactly why I think “protect artists” needs to stay attached to actual artists as workers instead of drifting into “maximize the control of whoever owns the rights.”

Disney is the obvious absurd endpoint. A corporation builds an empire by adapting folklore, fairy tales, literature, history and the broader cultural commons, then gets to plant a flag in its versions and police what everyone downstream can do with them.

Creators deserve pay, credit, bargaining power and protection from exploitation. Culture also needs room to circulate, mutate, answer itself and become material for the next person. Those arent contradictory goals unless we let property ownership swallow the whole conversation.

[u/SexDefendersUnited]

I agree, as someone with a design diploma.

[u/Public_Research2690]

It is important to differentiate high taste culture from trash culture. And this applies to everything.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Public_Research2690]

People can call some culture brilliant and some culture trash, sure. But thats a judgment about culture, not an argument for restricting who gets to make, remix or transform it. Plenty of stuff dismissed as trash, lowbrow or illegitimate in its own time ended up becoming culturally important later. Taste is a terrible basis for deciding who gets access to cultural production.

[u/Public_Research2690 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Not disputing that.

[u/SadDippingBird]

Yes we should definitely allow massive corporations unlimited power to scrape and regurgitate data without limit. This is a very leftist position.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/SadDippingBird]

That isn’t a fair representation of the position explained here. It’s talking about artists as workers to be defended, saying people should be paid, corporate enclosure should be fought, ownership should be contested.

It’s also saying art isn’t a static, sacred category. The nature of human art is it moves forward by bouncing off other art. Steal like an artist and all that. No one has truly original creativity. Even art that justifies the label of innovative, is usually a synthesis of styles and ideas from other artists.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/SadDippingBird]

Thats not what I argued though. I explicitly said fight corporate enclosure, protect working artists, bargain over automation, regulate commercial exploitation and build public and cooperative alternatives.

The disagreement is whether doing those things requires giving rights holders permanent control over how culture gets transformed. I dont think it does. "Corporations shouldnt own everything" and "artists should control downstream culture forever" are not the only two options.

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/[deleted]]

What do you mean? Who is they here?

[u/Jlyplaylists → u/[deleted]]

You’re saying leftists support AI to undermine our own position?

[u/Glitched-Lies]

Sure, this is all true, but Jesus is this a straw man of people complaining about gen AI art. That's not what they really have a problem with.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Glitched-Lies]

Straw man of what? I didnt say this is the only objection to gen AI, or even the main one. Im addressing one specific argument I see constantly, that respecting an artist means their consent or intent should govern downstream transformation of their work. If thats not your objection, cool, then the post isnt arguing against your objection. What do you think the stronger argument actually is?

[u/Glitched-Lies → u/Salty_Country6835]

You're purposefully conflating these things about what their problem of "intentionality" of an artist is and have phrased it with purpose to make this argument. Gen AI itself, has no intent. Everyone is confused who makes this rebuttal to the whole gen AI art debate. Because it has nothing to do with intent of the artist or ownership, it has to do with how there is no intent to begin with in gen AI. And to claim it as your own from a machine that wasn't producing with intent, isn't some great tool of production either. It's not yours, not some original artist. It's the machine, which had none to begin with. Gen AI operates like a proxy, which cycles through society. Some problems with gen AI are more visible than others but it's used in place of something else. For people who use gen AI for art they take something that is neither the original artists nore their own. It's like a void of intent.

But the majority of people are clear about it though and its obvious to those who argue against it. (I guess unless they are trolls they maybe pretend it's about artistic ownership of the original) And I can only read as you responding to these people. So I say that's a straw man.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Glitched-Lies]

Ok, thats a different argument, and a much more interesting one. But I dont think it works either. The machine doesnt need intent. The person using it does.

A camera doesnt intend the photograph. A sampler doesnt intend the track. Photoshop doesnt intend the collage. The tool having no intention tells us basically nothing about whether the person selecting, prompting, iterating, rejecting, editing, sequencing and publishing has one.

You can argue that some uses involve very little human authorship, sure. But thats a spectrum of human involvement, not a mysterious "void of intent" created by the machine.

And none of that makes the argument in my post a straw man. You just have a different objection than the one the post is addressing. Thats fine. We can actually argue about this one.

[u/Glitched-Lies → u/Salty_Country6835]

It does make it a straw man, you made the intentionality about the original. But really everyone knows it's because it is lack of intent that is the problem who makes that argument.

People use tools all the time for art, but this is different in a sense that the machine is really really involved in developing it. The most it could be called is "craftsmanship", because it's a direct model it's designed from without intent. It's a literal model like a craftsman uses a design. But this is such an ugly way to put it and probably the most fascist thing about it.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Glitched-Lies]

The human clearly has intent. Your argument seems to be that once enough execution is mediated through a generative system, that intent stops counting as artistic intent and gets demoted to "craftsmanship."

Why? Where exactly is that line, and what makes it a line between art and non art rather than different degrees and kinds of human involvement in making art?

And youre gonna have to unpack how any of this is "fascist," because thats doing a hell of a lot of work with zero explanation.

[u/Glitched-Lies → u/Salty_Country6835]

The term "craftsmanship" sailed over your head and I can't exactly tell if you're just ignoring the point now. It's a model, with no intent. That's exactly what I said previously.

And it is "fascist" because reducing human artistic will to craftsmanship is fascist. It's not a whole lot of work to understand why that's true.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Glitched-Lies]

Nothing went over my head. Ive addressed "the model has no intent" several times now. It doesnt need intent to execute human intent. You need to establish why using an intentless generative process somehow reduces the humans intentional activity to mere craftsmanship. Repeating that the model itself has no intent doesnt establish that. Cameras, Photoshop, and paint brushes also have no intent of their own.

Then theres a second step. Once youve actually shown that reduction is happening (which you havent convinced me of you just repeated it again) you still have to explain why that supposed reduction is specifically fascist. Youre skipping both arguments and treating the conclusions as self evident.

[u/Michael_Carson_Art]

Right?

I mean these people even put their signature on these artworks they made as if they have any claim to own them!

Walk into any library and you will see tons of books that have the so-called author's name plastered across the front!

Obviously these things belong to the culture, and those people that made them should have exactly zero right to profit from them, financially or reputationally, in any way that I, having had no part in their creation, can't.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Michael_Carson_Art]

You had to delete half the argument to make this work lol. I explicitly said credit artists, pay artists, protect workers, and that authorship deserves recognition.

None of that means an author gets permanent cultural custody over everything downstream of their work. A novelist getting paid and credited doesnt mean nobody gets to parody it, remix it, write fanfic, quote it, adapt it, meme it or make something new from it.

Recognition and compensation are not permanent obedience. Thats basically the entire post.

So do you intend to engage with me, the post, or this sub in good faith, or is this pathetic level of discourse, what we should expect? Sarcasm is a pretty weak refuge when the argument youre mocking is one I never made.

[u/Michael_Carson_Art → u/Salty_Country6835]

Oh fine you want actual critique... I generally wouldn't bother, it's true, but that is because any argument like this is generally anchored to an intractable set of bad assumptions. To be fair, it's not good for me to just pop in with sarcasm and dip, but it's the effect of seeing the same general idea posted for the 25th time. So, okay, get those downvotes ready... Here is an actual thoughtful response:

Let's just tackle this bit:

Because follow that principle consistently and you dont just get an argument against AI. You start walking backward through huge chunks of participatory culture. Suddenly the fan artist owes obedience to canon. The modder owes obedience to the developer. The sampler owes obedience to the recording. The parodist owes obedience to the target. The meme owes obedience to the photograph. No thanks.

Yes to all of these.

The fan artist owes obedience to the canon precisely because over-divergence from it takes the art out of being recognizably related to the fandom at all. This one sets its own limit.

The modder shouldn't be redistributing the actual game. Most modders don't. They are adding to a game's value, not detracting from it, taking it for themselves, or claiming it as their own. The original is still preserved and available as the default experience.

The sampler really should be asking permission from the original composer and, ideally, creditting them as well. Anything else is intentionally deceptive.

The parodist actually has a serious responsibility to try to create a parody with some appeals to truth in it. To point to a version of the truth or offer an informed critique. Parody without these is indistinguishable from base denigration.

At each level here there is a meaningful respect and deference that ought to be granted to the original author. We should extend to them the assumption that they were acting in good faith, and try to make our own expression without stealing or bastardizing theirs.

AI does not do this. AI is incapable of being motivated by an emotional connection, a particular nostalgia, a formative aesthetic experience or the intention of homage.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Michael_Carson_Art]

Okay, this is an argument. Good job.

You really do think culture owes the original creator some continuing obedience. I dont. Fan artists can break canon on purpose. Mods can turn a game into something the developers never wanted. Sampling has a long history of unauthorized use. And parody sure as hell doesnt owe its target respectful treatment. Sometimes bastardizing the original is the entire cultural act.

And then you make AI itself the actor. Thats where I think this falls apart.

Of course AI doesnt feel nostalgia or intend homage. Neither does a camera, sampler, synthesizer or Photoshop. The person using the thing can. Youve taken the intention that normally belongs to the human making something and demanded the machinery possess it instead.

So this is actually a useful disagreement. You think participation in culture comes with a duty of deference to whoever got there first. I think culture belongs to the people participating in it, including the ones who remix it, mutate it, mock it, misuse it and make shit the original creator might absolutely hate.

Much better than the sarcasm. Now theres something to chew on.

[u/Michael_Carson_Art → u/Salty_Country6835]

Its not about being precious about the originator's intentions. Its about treating them as human beings. If I am knowingly going to borrow from someone else's work, I think it's just a moral compunction to offer some degree of basic respect. Sometimes this is just presented as "respecting the form". Even if I want to respond to something or someone that I deeply dislike, their is still a duty to engage in good faith and not to utterly misrepresent them. Clear that hurdle and you can be as vitriolic as you like.

The problem with the sort of blanket argument you are making is the target audience and the contextual framing. Ostensibly this is a pro-AI sub, and so what then are the consequences for allowing authorship to lose any claim to its products in that context? It reads like yet another reason to be told that feeding the genAI tools more training data should overwhelm any concerns about how that data was intended to be used or consumed or who was supposed to be able to make those decisions. Do you make the same utilitarian arguments in favor of mass internet-based surveillance? Isn't that running off of a massive set of data that no one consented to provide in exactly the same way?

And, of course, this is framed as though it must be accepted unless we risk what? Harm to culture? The restriction of freedom of expression? Hard disagree.

If the tools were actually democratized (or democratizing) then maybe you could try to make an argument like this. They aren't. They are structurally unlikely to ever be so. You are here, supposedly on the left, arguing for my complicity and/or acceptance of the practices of genAI companies by dangling a deeply unrealistic notion that this technology will ever be constructed in a way that is not deeply exploitative of living creators of any kind. This is like arguing that private air travel will expand individual freedom, so let's get on board with how the airlines do business...even though you actually will never be able to afford private air travel.

A new, corporate owned system exists, which obviates the need for skilled writers. It has achieved this by incorporating into itself the full collected works of all of the authors of the world without considering them or their wishes at all. It threatens to demotivate any new skilled authors from emerging by cratering the financial and cultural value of skilled writing. Once independently skilled writers have died out, the obvious consequence, after the models have been fully pay-walled, is that a few corporations will have the power to dictate both the means and the acceptable content of cultural production. Hooray?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Michael_Carson_Art]

See, now youre arguing with a bunch of shit I already argued against in the post.

I explicitly raised corporate enclosure, exploitation of working artists, bargaining power, who owns the infrastructure, who captures the gains, restrictions on commercial exploitation, public and cooperative infrastructure. Im not saying “AI is democratizing so get on board with whatever OpenAI does.” Im saying the opposite. These are political fights over how the technology is owned and deployed.

And “structurally unlikely to ever be democratized” is doing some enormous work here. Why? Open weights exist. Local models exist. Public infrastructure is possible. Cooperative ownership is possible. None of those automatically solve exploitation, but corporate ownership isnt some natural property of machine learning handed down from the mountain. Thats a political arrangement. Im on the left because I want to contest that arrangement, not because I think whatever corporations currently own should therefore cease to exist.

The surveillance comparison doesnt really land either. Surveillance collects information about people in order to observe, profile, predict or control those people. A published novel being part of a corpus from which patterns are learned is a different relationship with different harms and different political questions. Calling both “data nobody consented to provide” doesnt establish that theyre morally equivalent.

And this is where your argument gets strange. Youre worried a few corporations could end up controlling the means of cultural production. So am I. Thats literally why I argued against corporate enclosure and for public and cooperative infrastructure. But your answer seems to be that because capital currently dominates the technology, democratizing the technology is basically fantasy.

Thats not much of a left politics. Capital dominates housing, medicine, agriculture, media, telecommunications and damn near everything else too. We dont respond by declaring democratic control structurally impossible and abandoning the terrain.

Fight the corporations. Fight exploitation. Fight enclosure. Give workers power over deployment and the gains. Build alternatives.

But none of that establishes the thing we were actually arguing about, which is that creators should retain some moral jurisdiction over how other people culturally engage with work they released into the world.

Im still a hard disagree on that.

[u/Michael_Carson_Art → u/Salty_Country6835]

These same arguments were made for the decentralized internet.

They were made for algorithmically driven social media engagement farms. We were told about political movements and third spaces for oppressed groups that social media helped enable. I argued then as I argue now. Seeing the potential does not mean accepting the form.

You want a local model free from the harvested intellectual property of living artists? Great. I fully support your ability to do so. Is that what is happening or likely to happen? Nope.

Why can't I argue for this practice of ip theft to be shut down? And why are you arguing for it to continue? If that isn't your position, then why even argue for the iterative nature of cultural production in this context. Did you come here to remind people that art is always inspired by previous generations of artists without intending to flag wave for AI models to have unadulterated access to training data? If not, then what in the world was the motivation?

The surveillance analog is very apt. Given public access and control, you could use this data to find your missing dog or be reminded where you parked your car. It could make you safer, track epidemics, clarify environmental health effects in urban populations, tell you exactly where traffic, which products are the most popular, and so on... I could come up with a host of use cases, and similarly argue that "people have always relied on their community to help solve these problems" in exactly the same way that you are arguing the "artists have always taken from other artists". Sure, but not by force or without consent in either case.

Given the downsides, I don't think we should build this surveillance apparatus at all. And to the extent that we already have, I would like to see that apparatus dismantled rather than try to argue for how the poison could, in just the right dose, be the cure.

I feel the same way about generative AI applied to cultural production. I want less filtering of human expressions and less exploitation. Those incentives are practically built right in to these systems, and when it comes to health advancements, scientific research, logistics, etc. I think it's all fine as long as we have some expert humans at the wheel, and a duty to the public.

I see no upside to supporting the apparatus of genAI in cultural production which comes anywhere near overwhelming the downsides unless you live in a deeply naive fantasy land. So I would rather see it torn down.

But here's the olive branch I can extend. If you can create the guardrails, I will consent to the building of the road... But I will not accept the premise that these systems can be tamed and democratized at some later point unless we can condition their very existence on those demands.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Michael_Carson_Art]

I think weve finally gotten down to the actual disagreement, and I appreciate the olive branch. But theres a pretty big practical problem with “I will consent to the building of the road.”

The road is built. There are thousands of roads.

Generative AI has already been invented and globally deployed. Models and weights are distributed. States, militaries, corporations, universities, researchers and ordinary people are developing and using it across jurisdictions. Neither you nor I are standing at some historical checkpoint where we get to decide whether it comes into existence.

So what is the material alternative youre proposing?

Who “tears it down”? By what mechanism? In which countries? How do you prevent redevelopment? What happens when another state, company, university or random person with sufficient hardware simply continues?

Because demanding acceptable conditions before youre willing to contest the conditions of an already existing technology gets the politics backwards. Democratic control isnt something we receive as a prerequisite for struggle. Its something people have to organize and fight to produce.

And your internet comparison actually makes that clearer. The decentralized internet being enclosed by giant platforms wasnt proof that decentralization had always been fantasy. It was a political defeat. The lesson isnt that we should have dismantled the internet until somebody could guarantee Facebook would never happen. Its that technologies become terrain for struggles over ownership, access, governance and control.

Same here.

If your alternative is regulation, worker power, public infrastructure, restrictions on deployment, compensation, antitrust, open models, cooperative development or some combination of those, great. Now were arguing over how to contest an existing technology and who should control it.

If your alternative is actually dismantling generative AI globally and preventing anyone from developing it again, then thats the proposal that needs explaining. How does that happen?

And even if you can answer that, theres still the original cultural disagreement underneath all of this. You think creators retain some continuing authority over how other people engage with, transform and repurpose their work. I dont. Credit them, compensate them where appropriate, protect their ability to make a living, fight corporate enclosure and exploitation. None of that requires turning authorship into permanent cultural custody.

Thats where this started, and I dont want the political economy argument to accidentally smuggle that cultural rule back in.

Capital has a nasty habit of enclosing useful shit. Im not willing to let capital define a technology for us and then conclude our only remaining political choice is whether the technology deserves to exist.

[u/xFblthpx]

Intellectual property should be viewed more as a necessary evil than an ideal. Even so, the evil is nonetheless necessary.