Walt Mosspuppet @[email protected]

How can you say it's a complex issue? It's not. It's a blatantly unethical attempt to redirect revenue streams from small artists to big tech companies with a disregard for copyrights or ethics. As a company hiring artists, there is no week without receiving an offer from yet another AI art company offering us to replace our artists with their algorithm. Some have the audacity to train their model with our copyrighted materials to show us how 'well' their model can replicate our copyrighted art. When we decline their offer, the standard follow-up is that we should rethink our decision because our competitors will use their model and be able to create games like ours way faster than ours. AI companies are basically trying to extort us - "buy our service, or we will sell models trained on your art to competitors." This business model is so abstractly unethical that a year ago, we could only imagine it to happen in a dystopian novel - they take the copyrighted works of others without permission or compensation and try to force companies to use their models, threatening them with selling models trained on their copyrighted materials to competition. Copyrights must be respected; no one should be allowed to train their models on someone else's work without permission or compensation. There is no reason to treat copyrights any differently just because big tech companies discovered algorithms of mass copyright infringement. Algorithms trained on stolen art won't cure cancer or solve the climate crisis or any other issue, so the argument about stopping progress is also ridiculous. We implore you not to promote the narratives of AI companies. As an educational institution, your role should not be that of a big tech PR firm. If you wish to hold a debate, include artist advocates in the conversation, rather than an overwhelming majority of AI executives and just a couple of token artists, which only creates the illusion of a balanced discussion.