So much for my career selling stolen jeans...

Above: Parliament. Disappointingly,
they no longer were the wigs.

Yes, Nick Clegg, that's because it's stealing. Who's Nick Clegg, and what is he stealing? Ok, he isn't necessarily a thief, Clegg, an ex-politician and former Meta--that's Facebook for those of us who don't know what NASDAQ stands for--said that Britain shouldn't force AI companies to ask permission from artists before using their work to train AI, because it would ruin the AI industry. I guess there's a piece of legislation in Parliament that would require AI companies to disclose what work was fed into their software for training purposes.

I suspect it would look something
like this, only somewhat more twee.

AI, I am given to understand, needs to be trained and it does this by consuming massive quantities of information. Like, if you ask ChatGPT or whatever to show you what the Defenestration of Prague would look like if it were a movie directed by Wes Anderson, shot entirely in Cantonese it can do that. But how well it does that depends on how many history books, Wes Anderson movies, and Cantonese-language dictionaries it's already consumed. So, kind of like people I suppose.

"You shall not pass this bill."

-Ian McKellen, milking it

But what if Wes Anderson doesn't want your robot crewing up his entire body of work and spitting it back out as a "new" creation. One for which he sees not a dime, nor receives any credit?  Well, he's not from the UK, so Parliament doesn't care what he thinks. They may however care what Sir Ian McKellen, Kate Bush, and the Royal Shakespeare Company alongside hundreds of other artist think, because they all signed an open letter opposing it.

Pictured: the awfully specific result
of my internet image search.

If I were to say, break into The Gap, steal a stack of men's slim fit jeans and sell them out of my trunk at the local flea market, that's a crime. I couldn't then argue in front of the judge that I shouldn't be convicted on the grounds that it would put a damper on my stolen jeans-selling operation. That's dumb, and so's this argument that AI companies should be allowed to steal artists work. Don't be too hard on Clegg however. Technically he was talking about the specific bill in question, and saying that Britain alone shouldn't outlaw AI training-related IP theft. 

He may have been arguing that Parliament shouldn't tie Britain's hands when it comes to AI, which I sort of get. But he was also kind of arguing that artists shouldn't own their intellectual property, at least when it comes to the needs of tech companies who need grist for their AI mills, which, is indefensible. 

"If you can think of a better way to create art than to feed the work
of human artists into a machine that reduces it to data, then generates content
derived from the artists work, but is no longer owned by them, I'd love to hear it."

-OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, evidently 

unaware that you can just hire actual artists*

*and admittedly, he's never said any such thing, but that's what this technology does, right?