AI Good Copyright Bad? w/ Nina Paley

➡ The Paranoid American podcast, launched in 2012, explores hidden truths and mysteries of our world, from secret societies to forbidden technology. The host also discusses issues like copyright and artificial intelligence, with guests like Nina Paley, an expert in copyright. They debate the origins and purpose of copyright, suggesting it was initially a tool for the rich to protect their businesses, rather than to protect creators. The conversation also touches on capitalism, discussing its pros and cons, and the impact of taxing the wealthy.
➡ The speaker discusses the merits and flaws of capitalism, arguing that while it rewards those who generate wealth, it can also lead to corruption and inequality. They also touch on the concept of a barter system, highlighting potential issues such as exclusion based on personal disputes. The conversation then shifts to the importance of civil rights in any system, and the potential for societal harm through actions like spreading false information. Lastly, they discuss copyright, trademark, and intellectual property laws, emphasizing the need for authenticity and the protection of original work.
➡ The text discusses the complexities of copyright, patents, and trademarks, particularly in relation to parody and consumer confusion. It also explores the idea of intellectual property being exploited or distributed widely, which the speaker views positively as it extends the market reach. The speaker expresses a preference for attribution but doesn’t see it as a requirement. The text ends with a shift towards discussing how artificial intelligence has changed the landscape of these issues.
➡ The artist discusses the impact of AI on art, noting how it can mimic styles and create convincing pieces. However, they express concern about the constant need to retrain AI models and the potential loss of human touch in art. They also reflect on how technology has revolutionized the film industry, making it more accessible but also changing its nature. The artist concludes by acknowledging the potential of AI to outperform human artists, but also the loss of unique, human-made art.
➡ The text discusses the impact of AI on art and culture, suggesting that the rise of AI could lead to fewer people pursuing art as a career. It also highlights the shift from a time when art was scarce and valued to a current state of oversupply, which is affecting how we perceive and value art. The text also raises concerns about the potential for AI to further erode our ability to discern reality and the implications for copyright laws in a world where AI can easily generate countless images.
➡ The speaker discusses the impact of AI on art and creativity, expressing concern over how AI and corporations control our cultural history. They believe that AI’s development is a natural progression of our curiosity and desire for power. Despite the fear that AI might replace human artists, the speaker suggests that human art will become more valued for its uniqueness. They also emphasize the therapeutic value of creating art, which may be lost with AI-generated art.
➡ The artist discusses their passion for creating art and the satisfaction they derive from it. They share their experience of being accused of being an AI due to the quality of their work. The conversation then shifts to the impact of AI on art, with the artist questioning whether AI-generated art can truly connect with humans in the same way traditional art does. They also discuss the potential for AI to manipulate human culture and the blurred lines between human and AI-generated art.
➡ The text discusses the unique experience of live performances and the human touch in art. It suggests that even though a song or a play may not be original, the human element makes it special. The text also debates whether art can be objectively good or bad, and if AI can truly replicate the human touch in art. It concludes by questioning the importance of knowing whether a piece of art is created by a human or an AI.
➡ The text discusses the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on art and culture, questioning whether AI can truly replicate human creativity. It explores the idea that AI might trick us into believing its creations are human-made, and how this could challenge our perceptions of authenticity in art. The text also touches on the potential for AI to saturate our world, and the implications this has for our understanding of reality. Finally, it suggests that we are living in a unique moment in time, witnessing the transition of AI from a concept to a reality.
➡ The text discusses the impact of AI on creative industries, suggesting that AI can outperform humans in areas like writing. It also touches on the fear of job loss due to AI, and the potential for large companies to monopolize AI technology. The speaker mentions their own experiences with cancel culture in the animation and comic book industries. Lastly, they promote their own work and discuss the possibility of AI mimicking their artistic style.

I have been recently accused of being AI that is how good an artist I am. Good evening, listeners, brave navigators of the enigmatic and the concealed. Have you ever felt the pull of the unanswered, the allure of the mysteries that shroud our existence? For more than a decade, a unique comic publisher has dared to dive into these mysteries. Unafraid of the secrets they might uncover, this audacious entity is Paranoid American. Welcome to the mystifying universe of the Paranoid American podcast. Launched in the year 2012, Paranoid American has been on a mission to decipher the encrypted secrets of our world.

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And if these AI generated memes dare to make fun of me, they’re crossing the line. This is your expedition into the realm of the extraordinary, the secret, the shrouded. Come with us as we sift through the world’s grand mysteries, question the standardized narratives, and brave the cryptic labyrinth of the concealed truth. So strap yourselves in, broaden your horizons, and steel yourselves for a voyage into the enigmatic heart of the Paranoid American podcast. Where each story, every image, every revelation brings us one step closer to the elusive truth. Hey, you can’t kill me. I’m still here, Paranoid American.

And today I’ve got Nina Paley back again. Because the last time that we were talking, we got in the copyright, we got into spicy art and woke based, whatever the nonsense terms were, and we didn’t even get into AI. And I feel like AI and the copyright debate are going to become more hand in hand as time goes by. Anyways, we’re going to talk a bunch about AI today with a true expert in copyright and offending people and not really caring. So I’m excited about our conversation. Welcome back, Nina. How are you doing? I’m good. Thanks for having me back.

So I want to do a real quick refresher. We don’t have to go all the way deep into copyright, but the thing that I came up reading through your blog posts and watching and first of all, Nina Paley Cedar Sings the Blues Seder Masochism. This Land is Mine. Copyright is not Theft. That’s the one with the asterisk next to it. Copying is not theft. Copying is not Theft. Apocalypse Animated. You’re on the Heterodor podcast. You also had a. I’m going to say it’s a TED Talk. You can put little asterisks next to that too, called Copyright is Brain Damage.

And I think a combination of that TED Talk and Copying is Not Theft and an article that you had written, it changed my entire perspective on copyright. Because my impression was that copyright is there to help the little guy. Like you write something, you make something real cool. And now this is mine, I get to own it. And the government’s providing me all these protections to make sure that I can keep that thing. That’s mine. And you’re nodding no. And I. And let me just paraphrase what I vaguely remember and you can fill in the details, but that copyright was actually a tool of the rich that owned the printing press.

And it was a way to protect what they had the rights to print. And it had nothing to do with the little guy making sure he got his fair cut. Is that a decent summary? It was a way to protect their business. It was. It was written for printing owner, printing press owners or publishers. It was written or stationers, as they were originally called in England, the Illuminati or the Jesuit. It was for the Illuminati. Yeah, the conspiracy. Okay. But ironically, right, like we’re literally talking about the Jesuits and the owners of the printing presses, which was either the church or it were.

Was people that were working against the church in secret. That was pretty much owned it. Yeah. Or maybe not even in. In secret. It was just people who could afford to get a printing press bought a printing press. You couldn’t do that unless you had money and resources. And it was just to protect their business. It was not to protect their. The people that wrote stuff. It was to protect publishers. So how do you think it got such a great rap after all these years? Like, here we are 2025, and I would, I mean, I’m just going to arbitrarily make up a number, but most people, it seems, would assume copyright is there for the common good and the common guy.

So like, was there a transfer? Is there a certain point when it started becoming more relevant to the common writer? Or is it still just as much for the printing press? As it is for the creator. Well, it’s even more, it’s even more for media corporations at this point than for creators and rich, well resourced people are smart and they do really good pr. And copyright is a monopoly. And historically there’s always been critics of monopoly. So the copyright owners, the copyright industries have had to defend this monopoly. It’s called an artificial monopoly, granted originally by the Queen or the Crown and now it’s just granted by the state.

You have to justify it because if you don’t have all these justifications for it, people are like, that’s an artificial monopoly. You’re a rent seeker. That’s not beneficial. There was an argument, I can’t quote it from memory, but in one of the initial arguments against copyright, the Statute of Anne in England, long ago somebody said something like all monopolies do is make things scarce and dear, like they don’t, they don’t help people. So that’s one reason the framers, the authors of the Constitution put the progress clause into the copyright part of the Constitution. I think copyright is enshrined in the Constitution.

I’m not sure whatever document enshrines copyright in the United States, it begins with to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. And an argument against copyright as law is that it clearly does not promote science and the useful arts anymore. So that was, that was part of the PR campaign was slipping that in in the original United States definition was the kind of problem make it sound better than it was. But the thing is at the time an argument like that was more reasonable. Right. Like there’s, there are legit arguments for protecting wealthy capitalists in a capitalist system.

There are reasons to, you know, protect. Yeah, to protect capitalists is because, you know, they employ a lot of people and you know, for, for printing you actually needed big resources. So it’s not like, it’s not like today where everybody had access to publishing. You needed big resources, somebody had to invest big in resources. And so you wanted to, you wanted to protect the investment of those capitalists. I mean, I’m not saying everyone thought that way. I’m just saying you can make an argument for that. You can make an argument for that today. Well, I’m glad you’re making that argument for the capitalists.

I’m sure they appreciate that. Yeah, I mean I used to you it means more than almost anyone else. I used to just be down with capitalism. Down with capitalism. And now, now in my post canceled state where I’m seeing more sides of everything than I Used to. You know, when I think about, what is it like California, I don’t know, states, states that tax rich people really highly. Those rich people do leave. So if you want a bunch of rich employers in your state, you won’t tax the living bejesus out of them. Or if, you know, if you want to have these more egalitarian, well, ideal, you know, equalizing of income.

It’s like if you, if you hate billionaires and you’re like, we’re going to just tax the bejesus out of billionaires, the billionaires will leave. And there’s good and bad things about that. You know, like I was just talking to a friend who was really shocked when I did not enthusiastically agree with him about how much I hate billionaires. It’s like, I don’t actually hate billionaires. I am more interested in everybody having enough of their needs met. It’s like, I don’t think that getting rid of billionaires means that everybody gets all their needs met. It just means you have less billionaires.

And it’s like, I don’t really care as long as everybody has enough. If some people have, you know, grotesquely huge amounts of goods and resources, it’s disconcerting. But it’s not my primary concern. My primary concern would be everybody else getting enough. And yeah, getting rid of billionaires doesn’t actually ensure that. Yeah, I’m, I don’t know, I’m not here to make a case for capitalism one way or the other. But I do tend to maybe start out with like socialists by default just because I went to public school. So that’s kind of what that’s, that’s the status quo, right, that they kind of push you into because that’s what the school, the public education system ultimately is.

But over time it seems that like warts and all flaws and all that capitalism has greed baked in. It understands like a human nature of greed and wanting to like take a shortcuts and just do everything that you can to make profit. But since it’s all baked in, it also means that whatever plays along with that system with the most merit. If you ignore the corruption part, just for a second, you ignore all the corruption part. But like, it is a system that rewards the things that have the most merit within that system. So if you do something that doesn’t produce wealth or capital, like you just do artwork, for example, you just do sketches all the time.

Right. You might not be getting rewarded within that system, but there are things that you can do to pivot to that would reward you in that system. So in that case, it’s, it’s somewhat objective versus any other solution where you have to have an in with like whoever the system is. Within capitalism, the corruption part comes in is because you’ve basically got like the crony guys that have all the wealth and you’ve got like the billionaires. And if the billionaires are like, I’m just going to always give jobs and investment and resources to this small group of people.

And that’s usually where it breaks down a little bit. Because even when I talk to my libertarian friends and it gets into like, we should all just go back to a barter system. I’ve got a horrible example, but it’s the one that I can’t get over. Like, what if I accidentally killed the shoemaker’s kid? Like, totally, completely accidental. Like I backed over him in a car, whatever, something happened. And, and now he’s like, no shoes for you. Never. You’re never going to wear shoes in this town. And I go at the town over, but then the, the shoemaker in my town talks to the shoemaker and all the other towns, he’s like, look, like, I don’t want to cause trouble with anyone.

Like, this guy doesn’t get shoes. I’m not going to get into it. He doesn’t get shoes. Now all of a sudden, in this like, barter trade economy, even if I’ve got something everyone wants, everyone might be intimidated to not allow me to get this one thing that I need. And at least in a capitalist system and others, there’s always a route for me to like, get that thing, regardless of my, you know, Persona non grata, I guess, unless they take away my PayPal and my credit card and. Yeah, that’s an, that’s an interesting example because when I was being more actively canceled because as you know, I have had the bejesus canceled out of me.

Congratulations, by the way. Yeah, the lefties, the far lefties who canceled me, they suddenly became real defenders of capitalism when it came to canc cancel culture. It was like, oh, yeah, you’re kicked off of this platform. Well, it’s privately owned platform and the owner can do what they want. Did that argument make sense where you’re like, you know what, you make a good damn point. No, I mean, what the, what it made a case for as the case you just gave is we need civil rights. Like any system, you need civil rights. So I don’t think, I think civil rights are maybe likelier in a capitalist system.

I don’t really know. But any system, you need civil rights. You need, you know, the individual to be able to have access to money and food and shelter and all that stuff, regardless of what they say. I mean, the example you gave was killing the shoemaker’s kids. Like, the example I would give is, you know, the shoemakers transing their kid. And you say something like, yeah, your son is a boy, not a girl, and then you don’t get the shoes. I guess in that case, though, ironically, maybe because it seems like unexpected, but me killing that kid is localized.

It’s like that shoemaker’s mad at me. But you telling the shoemaker that his son slash daughter is not whatever they’re identifying with technically, like, the whole half of the town could be angry at you thinking that, because at least mine was an accident. But you having that opinion is not something that you accidentally came up with. Right. But it is, you know, a far cry from killing somebody. I don’t. I mean, it’s like. And in this. In this case, I’m giving it. You’re not even telling the shoemaker that his son is. You’re just like, you know, writing an article saying male people remain male even if they take estrogen.

Something like that. And then no shoes you ever again. You’ve kind of poured through the Old Testament, I assume, New Testament for. For revelations and a whole bunch of other religious texts over time, Right. For, like, all your various projects. And one of the things that really started to stick out to me was when you look at the Ten Commandments, how come the worst things aren’t necess? It’s not necessarily in order of severity. It’s not like the worst thing at the top and the least worst thing the bottom. They’re kind of intermixed in there. And the long story short of the deep dive I did was that some of the things on there, even though it seems horrible, like, thou shalt not murder and like, thou shalt not bear false witness, like, how.

How did both of those make the top 10 when they seem so far apart from each other? And it’s because some are severe in a localized instance, like, if I kill somebody, like, it’s pretty bad for them and their immediate family, but for someone two blocks away, h. Like, you know, sucks to be in that neighborhood, property values go down, but doesn’t necessarily harm them directly. But bearing false witness, now I’m harming society as a whole. And if enough people are harming society as a whole, that’s ultimately even more dangerous than if five of us just Went out and killed a random person.

It seems like the state would rather that happen than five or ten of us go out and just, like, seed doubt in the system itself. So that, that was kind of my, my understanding of why killing is not as bad as misgendering. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think they’re also like that just to keep you on your toes, you know, like, it can’t, it can’t make that much sense. If, if it makes sense, then you might rely on logic instead of the religion for your guidance. Okay, let me pivot back to copyright. Sorry. I’m going to show you my cat because my, my cat is now participating, dog friendly.

Okay, good. Yeah, if my dogs actually cared enough, they’d hang out sometimes. But they don’t. Yeah, I have a great cat. How much does the, the copyright case that you make cross, you know, your various projects, but how much does that correlate to trademark and to intellectual property rights and everything? Is it, is it all just kind of like the same bag or are there nuances enough to say, like, well, no, trademark law and copyright law and intellectual property laws are different enough that you can’t throw them in the same bag. They’re different enough. I think a good thinker on this subject is Stefan Kinsella of the Mises Institute.

He wrote a book called Against Intellectual Property. He is against. I mean, there’s, there’s good criticisms to be made for all of it. My expertise is copyright. Trademark, I think, is the most legitimate trademark is. It’s got to do with, like, branding and authenticity. So an example of a trademark violation. Well, this isn’t an example, but, but, like, I don’t want people pretending to be me and signing my name to things that I didn’t make. So that would be more the realm of trademark law than copyright law. Like, I’m fine with people copying my work as long as they copy my signature on the work.

You know, don’t take my signature out of it. But I mean, even if they do take my. I’m not going to sue them if they do that. But putting, putting their own name on my stuff, or worse, putting my name on stuff, I never made that one I don’t consider as much. And that one also because, okay, so in the trademark aspect, some of my favorite style of art, I don’t even know if there’s like a name for it, kind of like the old news busters, if we’re talking like early 2000s, but where you would take a horrific photo and, and then slap like a McDonald’s logo on it and make it look like McDonald’s endorsing something horrific.

And it’s sort of a blend between parody. But you’re. You’re straight up. You’re not modifying the logo. You’re like, here’s McDonald’s endorsing, or, you know, here’s a BP logo on top of, like, a duck that’s, you know, has died. And that is. That is parody. That is. And if you use the actual trademark logo and leave the TM on it and everything. Yeah, they’ll be parody. Yeah. Now, the parody thing with trademark. It’s not like making a logo that looks sort of like their logo. That’s not the issue with it. It’s. It’s creating consumer confusion. You know, it’s like if some.

If you’ve. If you’ve created this thing and it really, really, really seems like a normal person, like you or me would not actually know whether McDonald’s had issued that or not. But we know. It’s like, in context, we know. See, that. See, that one is. It’s so hard for me to parse that out, because who are we talking about? If. If we took a sample of 12 people, I. It doesn’t seem like 100 of the time, everyone’s gonna be like, oh, I get it. You know, like, there you might find 12 people that were like, wait, that wasn’t a BP ad.

I’m angry now. Now I’m angry that somebody tricked me. Yeah, well, you know, tell it to the judge. It’s like, that’s why there are. That’s why there are trials about it. But that’s the idea. The idea is that there’s an exception carved in for parody, even of trademark stuff. Okay. And that. And that in situations where it’s like. It’s like if somebody actually paid huge amounts of money to make billboards or to advertise in exactly the same places that McDonald’s advertises in, you know, like the page of the magazine where you expect the McDonald’s ad. Instead, this other group has, you know, printed a war picture or something with the McDonald’s logo on it.

I love that. Yeah, I already love that. Yeah. But that. That would be a little tougher. Cause it’s like it’s in the context where it’s harder to tell what it is, and it’s more confusing. But, you know, it’s like, do it. See what happens in court. You know, see what arguments are made. But be careful, because McDonald’s has better lawyers than you. They Always will. So if they do. Justin. Fair system. So truly, whoever is right will come out in the end ahead. Right. It’s a meritocracy because it’s capitalist and capitalism is a meritocracy. Well, well, okay.

With. Within the system, it’s like the meritocracy is a subsystem within the bigger system. But it’s not like we can live in a meritocracy as the outer system. Yeah. Anyway, they’re interesting questions, but I just think that the trademark has more moral legitimacy to me than copyright or patents. Although the arguments for patent. There’s so many arguments right now for why pharmaceutical companies need to have these patents and why the business model of pharmaceutical companies is defensible. I don’t make those arguments, but I’m just impressed that people are still making them. It would be a different world if we didn’t have patents.

It would be a. I think. I think more technological process progress would occur without patents. I think there’s many excellent arguments for why that is the case. People who are trying to innovate are prevented from doing so. There are corporations that just buy up tons of patents with no intention of using them, but they are. Are legally entitled to block other people from developing and innovating. I think that’s bad for progress and culture and technology. So those are my arguments against the pharmaceutical angle of that that you’re mentioning now. There’s pharmaceutical companies that are running AI scripts that are just generating new novel configurations and then they just patent it.

It’s just like they have no idea what they’re going to use it for or have any plans for it. Here’s a new thing. Bam. Patent it. And then if someone finds out that it useful in the future, they’re kind of like the. What are they? The copyright trolls that’ll go out and buy the rights to an old song and then they’ll find other songs that were derivative of that and then try and get like law and just get them settled out of like. So this is like the weaponized version of the copyright. Intellectual property angle. Yeah.

This patent trolling. I mean, I. Yeah, there’s many arguments to be made against patents. There’s probably arguments to be made for them, but that’s not what I’m here for. My. My thing is copyright. I know a lot more about copyright. Okay, well, so. And it sounds like your thing when it comes to the copyright ultimately boils down to give credit to the original artist. Like if. No, that’s not. That’s not related. That’s not related to copyright. That’s just a preference. Oh, okay, so that’s, that’s more related to trademark. Actually, attribution has more to do with trademark than it does with copyright.

So what would be your boiled down stance on your own work? Like you produce an entire documentary blog post card. Someone takes a set of your cards that you’ve designed and just copies them and prints them and sells them and takes your name off of them. You would just prefer they didn’t do that. But ultimately, are they within the right, like within how you view the copyright system? Yeah, I’d prefer they kept my name on it, but I’m not gonna get too bent out of shape. It’ll be, it would be annoying. On the other hand, if somebody did that, they would be almost certainly extending the market for the cards.

Like me controlling those cards is a huge burden. Me assigning the copyrights to somebody who has more resources and is better at distributing and marketing cards creates another burden because that resource person is going to copyright them and is going to probably not exploit them as far as they could be exploited. Like when I, when I make work, I really want it to be exploited, which is another way to say distributed. I want it to go as far into the world as it can. And that means it’s like, yeah, if lots of people were printing my cards, that would be great.

I don’t know how these cards are going to get in Europe. You know, like there’s, there’s shipping charges when I sell them. It costs more to ship the damn things than. Sorry, am I allowed to swear? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Encouraged. Actually, I think you might even be under quota right now. Okay. If I’m allowed to ship or if I, if I ship the gosh darn things, I’m going the wrong way. It costs more. It’s like $20. Well, I mean, yeah, whatever. $20 to ship a deck of cards. More than $20 to ship a deck of cards to anywhere in Europe or the UK from here.

And I would like people in the Europe, in Europe and the UK to have my cards. If there’s any sort of demand for them, I would like the demand to be increased. And if that happens from somebody printing the cards without my permission, I would prefer that to them not being there. I would prefer them, you know, making a deal with me even more. That would be the ideal thing. But I’m still coming out ahead. It’s still better for me if somebody pirates them all over Europe and is successful that way. And I don’t even begrudge them their success because it actually requires money to physically print and distribute physical things.

I think that there’s a practical version of this that I’ve seen play out. So, like, a friend puts together a tarot deck and, you know, they promote it. The artwork looks really good. They get a small limited run, do maybe a Kickstarter or whatever, and it sells enough that it becomes popular enough that a printer in China says, oh, like, I’ve got those. Like, hey, they. They send those prints to us, we can just reprint them again and cut that person out. And this is a very common thing. Someone will make a patch or a sticker or whatever, and they get it printed in China, and China just keeps printing them.

They never stop printing them. And before you know it, you go on AliExpress and you’re like, oh, wow, that patch I made, or that tarot deck I made that I sell for 20, 30, sometimes like $80, because they do these limited runs. AliExpress is selling it for a dollar, or, you know, like, free shipping, $85, free shipping. I long for that. It’s like, Please exploit me. AliExpress, please. Why have they not done it yet? I have been putting my work out there for decades, and I am dreaming of the day a Chinese company makes shit, tons of copies of it and sells them cheaply.

That’s my dream. Please, please make it come true for you. That wouldn’t be too hard. Really? Okay, yeah, work on that. So the whole copyright angle, then let’s say attribution is a preference but not a require for your. Your take on this. We get into the AI world, and, man, it’s changed completely. I remember in 2019 or so, it was kind of the. The Google deep dream stuff, where it would just look very psychedelic or trippy. It would be like a puppy with eyeballs all over the place. And then it started turning into, oh, wow, you can say, generate me a cat.

And if you turn your head and squint a little bit, it kind of looks like a cat. Wow, this is really cool. And then, you know, as of, like, today, there’s people that are saying, like, we need laws built around this now. It’s. This is getting out of hand for whatever reason. Either it’s a misinformation thing because now it’s too easy for people to make convincing Photoshops, essentially, or that someone could just sit down and train a model on all of your artwork, all of Nina Paley’s entire catalog, and then just start creating things in your style based on what they want you to make.

And again, there’s not even necessarily an expectation of attribution the way that the pro anti sort of crowd is moving right now. Yeah. I’ve really been dreaming of AI being able to imitate my style. Somebody contacted me who actually understands where I’m coming from and told me about system called Lora or a project called Laura L O R a low rank adaptive network. Yeah. And it was like, okay, let’s, you know, let’s do it. Let’s get it to do my style. So I actually made a library of things to train it on. And then I just burnt out.

Like there. There’s a technical side of training that I just am not up to. If anybody wants to get in touch with me, I will give you this library. I’m right here. I can do. I do. Oh, you do that. You do Laura things this afternoon. Seriously, I’ve got a to train Elora. That doesn’t take more than 15 minutes. Do it. But the thing is, it has to be good. It’s like, you know, AI will do things and it’ll be like, this is in your style. It’s like, no, it’s not. So do it. But I’m. I am a bit picky.

Like, I do want it to really look like I drew it. If you can do that, my work on Earth is done. Like, I will never have to draw another thing for as long as I live. I could die. But the problem is that you train it today and next week a new model comes out that’s like a little bit better. And then after that, another comes out that’s a little bit better. So you’re constantly retraining your Laura over and over again, and it’s never going to quite be as good as you need it to be.

Or rather, on a long enough timeline, you’re not going to live long enough to see the best version of it, because it’s going to keep incrementally getting better while both of us are dead. All right, so did you just say that it’s never gonna get as good as me or as me as me? Yeah, I think so. I think that it can come incredibly close. But the same thing, if you look at when you record audio and you go from analog to digital, there’s this like, like anti aliasing that goes on where if you zoom in far enough, it had to clip off some of those little round bits and turn them into little square bits.

And I think that. But it will be good enough. It will be good enough. Like it could be. If it’s good enough to fool me, it’s definitely good enough. It’ll get there and not. And really the real metric is can it be good enough to fool everybody? And then can it be so prolific that you wake up and overnight it’s generated more art than you could have an entire lifetime? That’s amazing. I mean, I realize it would be really disconcerting. I realize it’s. I mean, my world is already upside down. Like, the world that I came from and grew up in is gone.

In or. Or. Because everything. What was the, what was the first big blow? I’m curious. Like, you, you’re doing everything by hand, traditional art. And then what comes along that you’re like, oh, this is. This isn’t gonna bode well. Like, did you care when like Photoshop came out? Or. I mean, that definitely. Well, it’s hard to say when the first big blow was. I mean, the fact that in 2008 I was able to release a feature film, a critically acclaimed feature film that won a lot of awards that I had made practically single handedly. Certainly I had animated it practically single handedly.

This is Cedar Sings the Blues. Yeah. Cedar Sings the Blues. Yeah. And it was unprecedented at the time. And it was like, all right, you know, this is different. I was a beneficiary of that because I was such an early adopter of those. I mean, there were, there were far earlier adopters of that technology. But to actually make a. A viable and good feature film, lots of people were making crummy, crummier stuff. But Sita was, you know, like a viable, well thought out, good piece of art. Since that time, movie industry as we know it has just been turned on its head.

There’s a lot of money in it. So they’ve put a lot of effort into suppressing the changes and put a lot of effort into maintaining a shell of their former selves. But Hollywood is nothing like it was 20 years ago. Film festivals nothing like they were 20 years ago, simply because of things like Final Cut Pro. Oh, hang on a second. I got a. End this phone call. Okay. Yeah, Final Cut Pro digital video cameras. Now everybody’s got a phone that’s better than a digital video camera. It’s like that has changed everything. I mean, I am old.

I am 57 years old. And film was film for the first at least half of my life. And film is very expensive. And yeah, everything is different with just the quality of cameras. AI. AI. It’s like if you’ve been worried about the other Technologies AI is like, it’s over. The game is over. It’s not that the game has changed. The game is over. So when did I see that? I would say with the first Images of chat GPI, the first OpenAI images that had, like, the astronaut. Was it like an astronaut on a horse or something? Yeah, riding like a unicorn on the moon or something? Something like that.

Yeah, I saw that. And, you know, you could tell it was. It was a synthetic thing. But I saw that and I was like, this is it. It’s only going to get better. And this is a. AI art automatically. In some ways, even that really primitive art is so much more competent than what most humans do, than what all but the most elite human artists do. Humans are imperfect. I mean, I would say that in the age of AI, our effortless imperfection becomes more of an asset than a liability. But, yeah, humans are pretty bad. Most humans are bad at art.

They can’t center something. Right. They can’t, you know, compose a frame well. They can’t do the lighting. Right. Can’t draw hands. Well, you know, AI’s hands. We say that I can’t draw hands, but it’s. It’s messed up. Hands are a lot better than when humans who can’t draw hands try. And plus, the hand thing was a tell like a year and a half ago, which in AI terms might as well be 100 years ago. Right, right, right. And I mean, actually, what was cool about. But what’s cool about AI mistakes and why I’m gonna miss them as AI art gets better and better is it just made the art, like, fascinating and psychedelic and surreal.

It’s like, here you get this. You get an image where on first glance, you don’t notice anything on first glance. And then you look closer and it’s like, oh, that woman has three legs. You know, it’s like, oh, that guy has four arms. But you don’t even notice at first glance. And it’s like, man, for a human being to do that. I just think of Salvador Dali struggling to get those kinds of effects and being lauded as a genius for getting those kinds of effects. And AI could. Can do it in its sleep, literally. What do you think about it being too.

I guess one of the arguments that I’m going to paraphrase beyond simplicity, but that it makes it too accessible, that now someone can make AI slop. Right. And it’s so much easier to. To get to something that looks better than it would take you five to 10 years to develop those skills. It’ll be better than you having to wait those 10 years, or it’ll be better than you hiring someone that’s willing to do it for like, 20 or 50 bucks. Like, it’ll make you a $200 equivalent, but it’s going to have AI tells in it at first.

Like, right. Right now, in 20, 26, maybe in another year from now that the tells are all gone, but that. That will discourage people from even wanting to develop art to begin with. And then on a long enough timeline, you phase out anyone feeding it new, human, organic, like, information and design, and then everything just becomes AI. Art. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s. That’s kind of happening. And it’s. It is astonishing that it turns the world upside down. It’s uncomfortable. It’s like, what the hell is happening? What do we lose? Let me just ask you that.

Like, what do we lose if all of the people that were gonna go to art school for, you know, 10, 20 years and develop their. And hone their craft, that those people will just cease to exist and we just have whatever AI can make? Yeah. I mean, fully lost. Well, I do think that some people will continue to practice art. I think a lot fewer people will think that it’s a job. You know, like art schools that, like, train you for a viable career, which has been a joke really, most of the time, but I think that the jokeyness of that joke will become more apparent to people.

I hope it’s becoming more apparent to people now. Was that peak like Mad Men days? Like, if you could get a job working on, like, Madison Avenue and you’re doing the artwork, or like the. Like it was. Is that really the time in which artists really had a path to making a capitalist system, or even has it just never been viable? I mean, the majority of art students are not going to get jobs. There’s always been more people that wanted to be artists than there have been jobs for artists. But there have been a lot of jobs for artists.

And even in the digital age, you know, companies like Pixar that just hoovered up a bunch of artists, even with all these digital tools. I mean, many of them were highly paid, and there were a lot of them. And every student I had at Parsons School of Design wanted to work at Pixar. And it’s like, you’re not all going to. Very few of you are going to work at Pixar. But now even jobs like that are endangered. But I do think that. I mean, I don’t know how everything like AI’s arrival AI arts arrival is like, okay, things are completely changing and I cannot predict how.

All I know is that a lot of things are going to be very different or are becoming very different. And you know, if like radical, drastic change that is difficult, that is like upsetting for societies, all levels of society. I mean, we’re talking about really upsetting cultural production and cultural consumption and culture in general. The main thing I’m worried about with AI is the glut. Like when I started in the arts, there was a scarcity of art. Maybe not a real scarcity, but there was some scarcity of art. There were not that many people that could make high quality stuff.

And if you developed your skills as an artist, you were meeting a kind of need for high quality images. And now there’s just a glut. Now you’re not meeting any kind of need if you’re developing those skills. And in addition, what it’s doing to people’s attention is profound. I mean, it’s probably going to just drive us all crazy because increasingly we can’t, we don’t know what’s real and what’s not real. I mean, we’re already crazy, but it’s gonna drive us more crazy. And yet when you say attention, you mean that it’s now people are being forced to give more attention to things that they see or that they’re giving less attention to it.

Well, no one’s forced to do anything. But we came from a world where images, I mean, I mean like we can, we can look out of a window and pay attention. Like there’s, there’s actual real things in the world still. We still live in the real world. We can go outside and look at things. But processed images, paintings, photographs, drawings, things like that, there, there weren’t as many of those. And like, if you think about human history, it used to be a big deal if there were just a painting. You know, like you’d go to a church, you’d look at stained glass windows.

That was a big deal. And maybe a painting would come to town, you know, or like an art show. Art shows used to be significant because like, you had no other way of seeing that art. You wouldn’t see a picture of a painting on the Internet or in a newspaper. You know, you wouldn’t even have like the printed art book to look at. You had to see the real thing, the stained glass. That’s the only time you might see a certain color in your entire life is when the light hits that particular stained glass. Otherwise everything else has got the exact Same palette.

Especially if you’re never leaving like the town that you were born in. Yeah. I mean, you probably see like flowers and fruits and vegetables. You might see those, those colors in nature, but you’re not going to see them arranged like that. So. Yeah. And then, you know, we got the printing press, which made, which, which gave people much more exposure to images. It made text and images much cheaper. That was a radical transformation of culture. Just the printing press, Internet, obviously before the Internet, television and film radically changed human behavior. And now it’s just like there’s just so much to look at.

Well, art is so cheap now. I mean, it’s not just cheap, it’s like there’s too much. There is a glut, but am I arguing against it? I’m just observing this. It’s like, wow, crazy times. And I think that we’re getting into a point now where it’s not just glut, because glut would just be like an over saturation of stuff. Because one of, one of the things that people maybe used to complain about, but now there maybe is some merit. And my, my simple example is like water cooler, like some TV show airs the night before originally.

What? There’s like five channels and like the, the 50s and 60s, whatever. Let’s. Even in like the 90s, when you’ve got 20 channels or 30 channels, if you don’t have like some crazy satellite system, chances are if there’s like this major event that’s happening on tv, most people are seeing it and you go to school or go to the workplace, the next day you’d be like, hey, how about that episode of. Or, you know, such and such. How about that, right? And most part you’d find people to converse with because there’s this, this standard agreed upon entertainment source that you all has of a frame of reference.

So even if we don’t work in the same department, even if our genders, religions, cultures, backgrounds don’t match, maybe we’re still talking about the Seinfeld episode or whatever the thing is, right. But now with the AI version. And I think this is like not just glut, but if we go to the water cooler, the Seinfeld that I put on, well, my AI, I put like Brad Pitt and like a Michael Bay to direct my version of the Seinfeld finale. And like, so we kind of saw the same thing. Like it followed the same beats. But yours was totally different.

Yours was like anime like night. Yours was like Gem and the Holograms meets, you know, like Darren Arafnovsky or something. So even though we saw the same thing, we tuned it in such a way that we can’t even relate and discuss the, the merits or like the, the points anymore. And that’s like, not just glut, that is that everything will be so custom and fine tuned that we no longer have these. What used to maybe just like banal frames of reference, but now it’s like, I almost miss the fact that we only had 20 stations and that everyone was gonna watch the Simpsons finale or whatever it was and to see who killed Mr.

Burns. Yeah. And this is actually. I mean, that aspect of cultural change has already occurred just with the Internet and just having people. YouTube means that everyone’s in a different room watching a different thing. Yeah, I mean, that, that’s been a long time and people have missed cultural touchstones for a long time. And yeah, our ability to discern reality and just trust what we’re being told is already super eroded. But it’s just going to get worse. Does copyright even have relevance when there’s a glut of media? If I can just sit down and generate 10,000 images, you know, in the next couple hours, like, what is.

How does copyright even have a role in that world where I can just make it to. I can just take a copyrighted image and feed it to AI and be like, make me something like this. And now I’ve got a thing that’s like that and now I don’t have to worry about copyright. Yeah, well, that’s. It’s always been the case. That’s always been the rule with copyright is no, you can’t use the exact image. It’s like there’s a song. No, you can’t use that song. But you can, you know, you can hire musicians to make you a song that sounds enough like that song so that you’re satisfied with it.

And that’s good because you’re paying musicians and you’re paying into this industry and you’re keeping the industry alive. So good. So, you know, just pay the money and get the thing that sort of is like the thing that you want. And now you can have AI do it. And now people are losing their minds. But of course, in my mind, copyright was not legitimate before. So before I was like, I mean, there’s a lot of reasons that I was not willing to make new things that sounded reminiscent of old things because old things actually have their own historical meaning.

And it was important for me with Sita Sings the Blues to be using genuine, legitimate old things because it was in many ways a kind of historical commentary. I was working with history and it really makes me mad that a handful of corporations control our cultural history. That we let them do that. That is not good. I do kind of feel like people like, we’re getting the AI we deserve. Like, this is just the natural progression. For better, for worse, this is what we deserve. Well, I want to. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Like what, what are we doing to have us deserve what we’re getting? And what is it that we’re getting? Well, we’re getting, we’re getting AI and I mean, we’re curious monkeys.

We’ve been developing technologies driven by our curiosity and our longing for power. If AI didn’t exist, how can I say it? It’s like nothing is more exciting than developing AI. It’s very exciting. You can’t just have this possibility and go, yeah, I mean, we came up with this. It is a natural development of our culture and technology. It’s just like it’s an extension of us. It’s an extension of what we are, what we develop. We’re smart monkeys and we’re gonna get it. You can’t make this not happen. I don’t think. I mean, other than using really, you know, brute, brute force and just be like, now we’re going to ban it.

We’re just going to globally ban it, which might also happen. I mean, people, people are freaked out by AI for a lot of other reasons too. And yeah, maybe, maybe that’ll happen. Well, the original AI paranoia, it was, it felt way more abstract. Even if we talk about like Philip K. Dick style or even like Terminator kind of style, like the Skynet, it was always some sort of like corporate warfare cyborgs or they were gonna like hot block out the sun or. But I don’t remember really any AI related sci fi content before, you know, the 2020s where it’s like AI is going to come and put artists and musicians out of work.

It was not even on the radar that that was what AI was going to do because there was this like, unwritten assumption that, oh no, we’re, we are far too creative and special of snowflakes for some machine in its infancy to do anything that could even rival human ingenuity and human expression of soul. And, and as they’re saying that, it’s like, how about this? And like, oh, this is not how I expected it to go. I thought you were just going to be crunching numbers and like, you know, like producing football games. And here you are creating works of art that are rivaling my own.

Yeah, it’s really humbling for us artists. It’s really just like, wow. Yeah. Everything that I thought, trusted and believed, everything that I oriented my life to is different. It’s like the north went somewhere else. It’s like the north is over there somewhere. How do you cope with that? It’s a. It’s a profound change. It’s disturbing. The same thoughts when it comes to AI and copyright and all and everything that’s happening. Is it the same for music and for visual arts, it’s all just the same media, or do you have, like, nuanced differences and how you think about those? No, I think about them the same.

But something I was. I have to finish my thought that I left 10 minutes ago. People will continue to make art, but they will have different goals and different reasons for making art. Like, I think that there will be a new interest in human art. Human art will become the exception. It will become the special thing. When. When someone says that, I just imagine someone patting themselves on the back for spending $8 on an organic avocado at Whole Foods. Like, yes. Oh, like, this is going to taste so much better. And ultimately it seems like maybe it’s the same.

Yeah, it is the same. Well, I mean, human art is going to be a little worse, but it’s going to be more human that you paid $8 for is going to have a little rotten spot in it. You have to, like, cut around, probably. Yeah. But you’ll notice a lot of people do pay $8 for an avocado at Whole Foods, so I think there’s going to be more interest in live music. You know, one on one human experiences. It might actually get us to value reality again. Maybe because we’re gonna get just so exhausted by not knowing what’s real and just like having our brains fried by this glut of images and videos and things like that.

I mean, I know people that really like live music. And beyond that, there are reasons to make art. Like, I make art regardless of whether making money, especially having been canceled. Right. Like, I’ve spent the last eight years in cancel land, so my art has not gone into the world the way I wanted it to. And all this, you know, positive, you know, I don’t get to go to film festivals anymore. I don’t get invited to talk on college campuses anymore. I don’t get invited to. To speak anywhere. Seldom get invited on podcasts. You’re only one transition away from opening those doors.

Again, though. Yeah, I’m closer to it. I’m closer to it. And we’ll see. We’ll see what happens. It’s like, I can’t live my life. I can’t. If I direct my attention at trying to get attention from other people, that way lies madness. So I have to just focus on art. My last art project, or my current art project is about illness, about chronic illness, which is a very human thing. And I made these Disabling Impairments cards as a way to personally process the reality of getting sick as I age. So that is a reason to make art.

It’s, like, beneficial for me to work through all this stuff, like drawing pictures of the thing you’re afraid of. I am so grateful that I can do that. I’m so grateful that I can process things that way. I also. I’m not a professional musician, but I walk around singing much of the day because it’s pleasurable for me. And maybe I’ll sing in public at some point because I enjoy it, not because it’s going to be a job or pay or anything like that. In me, at least, culture is not dead. I am glad that I can do these things.

I’m glad I can write, too. I mean, I’m just glad that I have avenues of expression, because that helps me maintain my mental health and function as a human being. So those are all reasons people may still do those things. Although who knows what it’s like to grow up in this era or will be like to grow up in this era. Yeah, because even as you’re describing that, right, you’re trying to process just having medical issues as we get older and being able to, like, sit down and draw and express that and get it out. Part of that, I imagine, because when I’m.

When I draw, like, you get to turn your brain off a little bit where, like, now your brain is, like, following the. The tip of the pencil on the paper, and you’re, like, seeing shapes, even if you’re putting thought behind it. You get to completely detach yourself from the thing that you’re trying to relate to. But there’s maybe a new wave of, you know, AI artists that are coming out, and their way of processing this would be like, generate me a picture of, you know, a bleeding bowel or something in a cute Nina Paley style. Right.

And then it just generates that. But. But the problem is that while you’re waiting those 20 seconds for it to create something, now you’re back to wondering about, like, reality. And you. You don’t get to stay in that fantasy world for two or three hours as you’re figuring things out. It’s just like, give me this thing. Okay, here it is. And then you’re. You’re automatically left with, oh, I don’t feel any better now. Like, this instant gratification didn’t really solve anything. Whereas maybe taking your mind off and being forced to be a little bit longer. I guess this is like a pro argument of where someone, if they’re like an anti AI, they’re saying, like, oh, well, it just removes all the barriers.

It’s not a democratization of artwork. This is. And usually it’ll go into, like, theft or stealing or slop or whatever. But maybe the real merit there is that part of the process and that it takes long. You’re investing more in it, is that you are being able to, like, offload more thoughts and feelings that aren’t happening when you just generate it all. Yeah. I mean, and same. It’s like when I’m cooking or walking around my house and singing. It’s not for the product. I guess it’s the process over product idea. I know it’s easy to say, but most of the people that talk about process over product are terrible freaking artists.

I don’t understand how they get any pleasure from it, but they do. I mean, apparently they do. Like, for me, it’s actually important to make something that looks. I get satisfaction from being good at what I do. Maybe that won’t be necessary anymore. I don’t know. I’m. I’m glad I draw well. I have been recently accused of being AI that is how good an artist I am. You or like, a specific art piece. Yeah, I shared my cards on Nostr. I don’t even know what that is, but I think it’s another network. It’s. It’s sort of like the Fediverse, but different.

It connects to the Fediverse. I use a access site called primal.net. it has a lot of people that are into Bitcoin on it. Anyway, I. I shared some of the art there as I was making it, and somebody called it AI Slop. And I was like, okay, I’ve arrived. It does seem like it’s one of those. Those milestones that if someone hasn’t accused you of AI Slop, then you haven’t. You haven’t quite, like, hit that level yet. So how does that. How does it feel? I mean, I assume like a mix of emotions between frustration and embarrassment for, like, secondhand embarrassment and disbelief and shock and, like, like, what do you go through when you’re confronted with someone saying that your work is AI Slop.

Yeah, it’s still pretty new. I was like, wow, things have changed. It’s like the world I knew is gone. We really cannot tell truth from lies at all. I mean, it was already really difficult. That was what people said about Photoshop when Photoshop came around. It’s like, we can’t tell what’s true and false, but we did a pretty good job. And, yeah, that game is over. But again, the argument for that one was, well, at least it took you two or three hours to make that thing look convincing. And now anyone with a con, with A smartphone within 10 seconds can make something more convincing than it used to be.

A Photoshop expert spending all day that, now, this is a problem. But really the only difference is just the speed and the gatekeeping. I like how you keep saying, oh, anyone is doing this. I’m like, AI itself is going to be doing this. You don’t even need anyone driving the AI. AI can drive itself. You know, you can just set it up. Yeah, it’s. It’s like I don’t even know what is going to motivate the generation of these images, assuming that it’s always going to be people motivating, it seems like when you say that, but I wonder if.

If we were. And this is like, abstract, so we don’t have to figure out, like, the actual logistics of this, but let’s say AI does get to decide what it wants to do on its own. I can’t imagine for even a nanosecond it would divert any resources on making music or artwork, because music and artwork to AI is just more sequences of numbers. If anything, it’s going to figure out how to, like, kill people or gain more resources or something. Like, it would if it were up to AI, it seems that music and artwork would just cease to exist entirely.

Well, AI lives at this point in a world of humans, and it’s probably a lot easier to manipulate humans than to just kill them all or whatever. Like. Like, culture is very good for placating, distracting, appeasing, manipulating us. That’s why we use it. That’s why we make it. We do that to each other. I’m sure AI will want to do that until we’re all gone. Okay, well, in that case, we don’t really have to fund any more arts. We can just let AI take it from here in a. In a serious way. Well, it depends on what we want.

Do we want connection to Other human beings. That’s what art has historically been. It’s been a way for humans to connect with each other. And now we have this synthetic thing and we have a simulated experience of connection, but we’re not actually connecting with each other. And people are beginning to go like, oh, yeah, what’s going on? And that’s why people, I think, are going to want more live in person events. Well, I want to understand that more because if, let’s say AI can generate artwork, that fools me into thinking it’s traditional artwork. And I feel some kind of a human connection.

Oh, wow. Whatever the artist was going through there. Because I don’t have any personal connection to Van Gogh. Right. Dude’s been dead. When I go and look at something like, who. Who do I have that personal connection to? If AI generate something at the level of Van Gogh and then someone sees it 100 years after the AI that generated it is. Has been phased out, like, what’s the difference? Like, how is there more human connection to the thing made by the human versus the thing made by AI? That is a great point. Have you been moved, have you been moved that way emotionally by AI art? I don’t want to say moved emotionally, but I have 100% been tricked.

There was, There was a survey of here’s a hundred different AI art piece or AI slash human made somewhere, 3D generated by humans. Some were 3D generated by AI, some were traditional by humans, some were traditional by AI. And as I went through the whole thing, I got an average score which was roughly like 54. Right or wrong. And basically it. It humbles you to let you know whether you’re pro AI or anti AI. You don’t really know the difference. If you look through enough things, you will not be able to tell. And that’s where. Because.

And I do this too. I generate like, AI music and I’ll post it on like, SoundCloud under like a name that’s not mine. Just. Just put it out there. And some of them will be like, I can hear the pain in your voice on this one. And it’s like, I, like, it’s. It’s not a compliment and I don’t feel bad or anything about it, but it’s like, man, so like, someone had a human connection to this and felt pain and emotion. And this was just generated by suno in like 20 seconds as an afterthought. Like, I just mash the button 50 times and that just happened to be a good one, right? Yeah, I.

It’s like, it is Horrifying. But it’s so fascinating what is happening. So I think it is fine to be moved by AI art because AI is accessing the same shared culture that human beings access when we make art. So, you know, as a, as a copyright abolitionist, you know, I had this, this awakening or realization that culture just moves through me. That when we talk about things being original, that’s kind of a joke. And that most of what I do as an artist is I reprocess things that are already there. I get, you know, ideas and inspiration.

And I mean, I use tools that came from somewhere else, ideas that came from somewhere else, a language to describe them. Even visually, like visual language is a real thing. It is shared. So I’m just, you know, swimming in this sea of things that came from somewhere else and I’m just processing a little bit. It’s just like coming through me. It’s not actually me and my ego doing it. And AI has access to the same stuff, the same culture, but more so, I mean, AI has seen things I will. Has access to things I’ve never seen and has access to things I’ve never heard.

And it is doing what human artists do, which is mix it up and spit it out. It’s doing it quickly and efficiently. So what, Everything AI has been trained on thus far is human. It is a human culture generating machine. It’s trained on human history. Yeah, our shared whatever it is. So yeah, there is human. I mean, if it’s reaching humans, it’s because it originated with humans and got processed by AI instead of being processed by another human. Some of like the human element remaining in art or music. You mentioned like live music, right? Live music also seems like it’s going to get into this gray area because you could have a group of live human beings that get together and practice a song that was originally generated by AI and got all the melodies and spelled it all out and then the humans just kind of adapt to it.

So now did like, are they adding the human soul to a thing that didn’t have the soul to begin with? Or are they like, if they’re just copying a copy from something that originally didn’t come from a human directly. Right. I mean, an amalgamation of human by proxy, maybe, as we were just describing it. But if, if Suno generates the song and no person had ever written those lyrics or written that bass line or that melody and com combine them together, is it really giving it more human to just have humans play it, even if it was originally created by non human? Yeah, I Mean, the experience.

You’re still going to have the experience of a human singing live. I mean, most. Most songs that humans sing, they didn’t write themselves. I mean, most songs that I sing are from the 20s and 30s, and everybody involved with them is dead. The same way Van Gogh is dead. But you can still see Van Gogh. Piece of art. But there is something about being in the presence of another human being. Just hearing the singing, it doesn’t mean that the song itself is original, but you are hearing a human thing who’s right there with you. I mean, it’s why people go to live plays, right, Instead of.

I mean, they go to movies. We love our canned and processed stuff. But there is something different about seeing a live play with live actors because it has more human flaw to it. Like, someone might flub a line or you might hear slightly poor acoustics, but it makes you feel like you’re part of a more intimate, organic experience versus the you went and saw, you know, again, like a heavily edited movie. So. Yeah, well, we. We have more senses than just our eyes and our ears. Like, when we get stuff through a screen, there are a lot of senses that are not being stimulated when we’re with other people.

Some weird. Some weird stuff happens, especially when we’re in groups of people that are watching the same thing. Like laughter is this weird subconscious thing that we do in groups. I’ve seen movies. I’ve seen the same movie with different audiences in different places where it almost seemed like seeing a different movie because the audience was different. And the audience is, like, always subtly communicating and subconsciously communicating with each other through cough. Like exactly when you cough, exactly when you laugh, exactly when you breathe, glancing over at the people next to you. Whereas everyone else in the theater is also doing that.

There’s some sort of thing that is happening in real life that doesn’t happen when you’re just alone with a screen. I mean, on a long enough timeline, I can simulate all of that. Yeah, on a long enough timeline, it can. Probably. Maybe. I actually. I don’t know, because we don’t. I mean, I think we don’t. I don’t think AI understands how this stuff works any better than we do. AI is reliant on us. I mean, it could read studies of. Written by people who study crowds and crowd behavior and these senses. But I don’t think we understand these things.

So I don’t think AI does either. So this one. I get different answers when I talk to various friends that are artists, musicians. But can artwork be objectively? Good or bad. And I know that’s, like, objective opinion on whether or not it can be object, but deep down, do you, Nina Paley, believe, like, artwork can be objectively good or bad? Well, I act as if I do, don’t I? Because I can look at some stuff and go, like, this sucks. I mean, it happens a lot. It’s just, this sucks. So I’m. Yeah, I’m gonna say I act as if it does.

I’m not willing to. I mean, of course I can’t say, like, in the great. You know, in the abs, there’s some absolute rule of it. But it’s so clear in my world. I’m just. I’ve seen such garbage. I’m just so hesitant to say, like, oh, well, you know, that’s no worse or better than anything else. I’ve seen people do that too much, and it annoys me. You don’t have. Stuff is crap. You don’t have to give me the full formula. But I’m curious, like, what would your metrics kind of be, like, if you were. Whether or not I like it? Well, I don’t believe that.

I think that you could. You could probably be more nuanced than that. I have a feeling that you could see something you don’t like and still think, like, this is objectively good art, even if I hate it. But there’s probably some things that you. You would see, and, like, that’s not even art. I’m not even going to consider that art. Yeah. Okay, so I see. Wow. This. We should have another conversation about this and actually use some examples. Okay. That’s what we should do. Because this is gonna go. Yeah, I mean, that would be a really interesting.

We should both, like, look at things and. And we’ll see who’s right. We’ll get, like, who. Who won out of, like. We will go through 10 pieces of art. You’ll say if it’s either objectively good or bad, I’ll say, objectively good or bad, and we’ll find out who won. Yeah. You’d have to find some real crap, though, honestly, going through the list of AI art pieces, AI versus human, and just seeing how close you think that you can get, because first you gauge them all on a scale from, like, 1 to 10 on how much you think it’s human versus AI, and.

And then you rate yourself on how well you think you did overall on the test. And it’s. Every single person I’ve seen take it is shocked. They’re like, oh, I thought I was Way better at this than I am. Yeah, but that’s different than judging whether art is good or bad. Well, but it’s different, but I think it’s related because the next, the next logical question to follow this up is that, well then clearly, objectively good AI art would be superior to objectively bad human art, regardless of any other context. Right? Or do you think that they.

Yeah, but actually talking about this, I am remembering that these trends happen in art and some of those trends are for like naivete in art. Naive art has become popular, what we call naive art. What, what’s naive art? I mean, art that looks like a kid did it. I mean, that’s the famous thing. Like you’re in a hospital. Not hospital. Why did I say hospital? It’s an institution. You’re in a museum, you’re an art museum. And an older person’s looking at an abstract painting saying, my three year old niece could do better than this. Like a Pollock painting or something.

Yeah, like that kind of thing. There have been, and in illustration there are these trends. Like, but even, even that stuff can be done better or worse. AI does a beautiful job of actually doing naive art styles better than most humans. There’s something about, there’s something about well done naive art and terrible naive art. Some people are just really bad. Like some of the worst art, which I don’t think AI can do at this point, is when you can tell the human was really trying to accomplish something and just missed because they were not competent. In fact, have you heard of the Museum of Bad Art? No.

No. Look up moba. I think their website’s still intact. It’s a fantastic website. Okay, and so Museum of Bad Art, is this just like children’s painting? No, no, it’s, it’s really. But, but at the same time, you can’t say that that bad art is really bad because it’s been carefully curated. They have carefully, you know, they get this stuff from like trash cans and thrift stores and things like that. And it is, it is exquisitely bad. Like, but sometimes when something is exquisitely bad, it actually shows a kind of genius. So I don’t know, but this is the kind of genius that at this point I think only a human could display.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m wrong. And then at some point we just can’t know. Like if everything that we’re seeing is through a screen, we just, we can’t know. And does it matter? Why is it important to know? That’s a question for you. Well, why is it important that we know if it’s AI or not? Yeah, I ultimately don’t think it is important. I. I think that. And I. This is maybe in an extreme sense, but even as you’re talking about, like, being out in nature and seeing real reality, my mind always goes to, like, that’s not what Renee Descartes would say.

Renee Descartes would say that every single sense, at least when it comes to vision, that’s just your optic nerve vibrating for some unknown reason. Who knows if that bird really flew by or if someone just walked by and bumped you in the back just the right way to make your optic nerve make you think you were seeing a bird fly by. So therefore, the only real, like, reality that you can trust is just your own logic and intuition coming from inside your brain. And all the other sensory inputs are there to trick you and can and mislead you every step of the way.

So I kind of. I like that as the original approach, because those are the kind of people that never were like, oh, man, now I’m gonna have to analyze every picture I see more detail because I don’t know if something might be lying to me. I like to think I don’t know. Man photons have been lying to us since the first caveman wandered out of the cave like it was. It’s always been lies the entire time. No one needed to wait for Stalin or Photoshop. Do you think reality exists? I think there is an objective reality.

And I. And I don’t think that us all thinking or wanting the same thing changes that objective reality, like, in, like, the four agreements, secret kind of way. So, yeah, I think that there is something objective to where if 100 people all try and walk through a wall, like, we all don’t get to walk through the wall. Like, there’s something real about that, but outside of that, I don’t know. It gets. And especially when we start talking about artwork and media and music and sort of, like, these subjective areas, it goes all out the window for me, to the point where I guess that’s.

That’s my main conclusion, is I don’t care if a human made this, if you trained a panda bear to do this, or if you train a computer to do it. If I find some sort of merit in it, that, like, I. It generates a thought or a feeling in me or I want to put it in my wall, that’s the end result. But I. I get that there’s people that want to do purity tests out there. And one of my favorite Examples is kind of related. What you were just mentioning about the Museum of Bad Art.

It was. I doubt you see, it was very, like, niche thing, but it was on, like an old 4chan thread and they were debating about AI slop and that I would rather see some horrible human sketch than the best thing AI could make. And someone posted like, you mean like this? And it was like a Sonic the Hedgehog drawn on a piece of scrap paper. And, like, the proportions were all off. And it was generated by AI, right? And everyone’s like, yeah, I would. Like, I can feel the human soul in that. And they’re like, oh, that’s cute.

And then it zooms out and yeah, it was generated by AI. Like, again, just the proof being that people put all this stock and investment in, like, I want to be able to see the human in this. I want to feel the soul. I want to know that a human. And I guess ultimately it’s like, you. You won’t. You will never know that the song that you’re listening to, like, all it takes for you to be tricked one day. And. And I wonder. I want to be inside someone’s mind. That first time it happens in a big way, where they find out their favorite song of the summer was 100 AI generated.

Because does that mean that now they just don’t like the song and the next time they hear it, they won’t like it? Or do they have to, like, force themselves to not like it and convince themselves they didn’t like it because now it crossed some sort of, like a moral unwritten law in the back of their head and they have to deal with this, like, this conflict, essentially. Yeah, I. I agree with you. I think. Well, I would hope so. Yeah. This is. I mean, it’s forcing a reckoning, isn’t it? It’s forcing a reckoning of how we.

And there’s. There’s also, I guess there’s like a. I don’t know, pronounced Schouten Freud or whatever, when you’re, like, happy at someone else’s suffering in a way. But it’s like. And see, like, you. You were up on this high horse and you thought that you knew left from right. And now you’re being confronted with this thing and ultimately, like, you had no power to begin with. It didn’t matter whether or not you have a preference for AI or not. Like, AI is coming and it will trick you and it will. It will super saturate the entire world that you’re involved in to the point where once you stop Caring, you’ll realize it’s always like you’ve always been saturated palm of Reedus.

Are you familiar with him? I’m not, no. Yeah, very good artist and comic book artist also. He said, all art is lies. What else would it be? And he said that like 30 or 40 years ago is. Would you say he would be pro AI? I don’t know. You’d have to ask him. It. It’s seeing again. I’m just going to arbitrarily make up a number of fractions here, but it seems like most artists that I know are for the most part anti AI. It feels somewhat rare still to be pro AI and the ones that do tend to get dogpiled on.

So maybe there’s like a silent, silent majority of more artists that are just like afraid to come out. But it, it seems like you extract malice if you come out and say, hey, I’m an artist and I like air. I don’t think anything too bad is going on. Yeah, I mean I. It’s not a matter of whether I like it or don’t like it. I. Resistance is futile and stupid and very small minded. I think it’s fascinating. It’s. It’s amazing. It’s. It’s mind blowing. It hurts because it’s so humbling. But I mean, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t trade this, I wouldn’t trade being alive now for anything.

The world is so weird. It’s changing so much and it’s like, it’s beyond, it’s beyond anything I could have imagined. And I think I’m going to be okay. You know, I’ve been okay so far. It’s like I have my needs met. It’s like I don’t have to panic. Like I’m gonna run out of food now. Yeah, I have my needs met and I’m just, I’m witnessing so much. It’s just so weird. It’s like being in a science fiction novel, but it’s actual reality. I think that we’re, we’re living in a very rare tiny moment in time.

It’s gonna, it’s. It’s just a blip in the overall scheme of things in which we’re seeing real time. The transition of AI Going from it’s not that great to like, oh my God, this is scary. Like that. That slow transition is only going to happen really one time ever. And we’re kind of in the middle of it, right. We got to see the Will Smith eats spaghetti from 2019. And the Will Smith eats spaghetti from 2026. I don’t know if you know what I’m talking about, but that was like, one of these metrics is how realistic can AI make it look of a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti? And it went from something that would give you nightmares to like, oh, wow, that looks like a real video in the span of, you know, five or six different years.

And that. It doesn’t seem like that kind of transition happens ever again. The same transition of having no Internet to having Internet, it just kind of happened within the span of like, one or two generations. So everything that comes after this, and. And maybe. Maybe I’m more entertained by this concept than other people, but prior to right now, Prior to like 2020, anytime a movie or a TV show or a book would bring up AI, it was a science fiction book or movie or novel. Right. It was like, for nerds. But now, from now till forever in the future, if someone brings up AI, it no longer has to be sci fi.

Like, it’s just talking about a natural reality of the world. And again, it just emphasizes how we’re living in this tiny little blip of a transition in time when something went from crazy sci fi to like, oh, yeah, that’s normal. My. My kid does that. My kid does chatgpt. Yeah. I think of this moment in the movie Blade Runner where this woman says, you think I could afford a real snake? She’s been, you know, I’m talking about. She’s been like, performing with the snake, but the snake is like a robot snake, which, you know, is. Yeah.

Anyway, I just like, yeah, that’s becoming real. You think I could afford a real snake? It’s like, no, it’s easier to make a robot. Sn Another, get a snake. Right. Another floke deck. Yeah. Two things I want to talk about. One of them is Pluribus, and I forgot the other thing. Have you seen Pluribus? I have. I’m all caught up and let me just say, little overrated. Yeah. But it does address a lot of AI Conundra. Conundra. How so? Well, where are they going to get new culture from? You know, like, they. They. As soon as.

As soon as you’re joined, you don’t need music or art or song or any of that stuff anymore. But they’re apparently into it. Like, they all read the protagonist’s book and are eager for more, and it’s like, where are they? Where are they gonna get more? That seems like they’re. They are. That’s true. Patronizing her. I don’t think Anyone actually likes the book or cares about the book. You may be right. Yeah, but. But it’s like, yeah, all they’re gonna do is just recycle what they’ve got. I mean, apparently they. They dig each other’s shared memories, but that’s all they got.

They’re only get new stuff if there’s unjoined humans. And also this idea of having access to all memories and all culture really, which is what AI basically has. I. Yeah, I. I definitely see because the creator was Vince Gilligan or something that he’s even added a little credit. The end. Like this show was made by human hands, no AI involved or whatever. So people have been using Pluribus as the ultimate dig. Like, aha, you know, shots fired at AI See, this is how humans. But ultimately it. It does show how fragile and how pointless. Like all of the different specialty.

Like this lady that spends her entire time trying to come up with like fiction and writing. Deep down I think that she’s embarrassed that she’s just writing like schlock novels. And she kind of looks down on the like her own fan base. Like she’s above them. Like, I can’t believe you’re reading this garbage. Okay, let me write some more of this garbage for you. So she’s caught in this like mode. So if you were to compare that to AI it’s like she’s not necessarily an artist at the top of her game that is now being threatened by AI being her equal.

Really. Like Pluribus is better than her in every way. In every way. Yeah, it has. It’s like more empathetic. Like it is better than she is as this great human. Even though it’s like synthetic human, it’s better than her and it’s eating her up alive. I like that. All right. The other thing I was going to talk about is Schadenfreude, which you brought up. There are. Yeah, I have to say that there is an element of that with me. I have been canceled, thoroughly canceled by certain industries. You know, like the. Some of the worst centers of cancel culture have been the animation industry and the comic book industry.

And so now many of these people that canceled me. Are they going to lose our jobs? It’s just like. Well, I guess I have a head start on accepting not having a job. I think there’s the more Schroden Freud. I don’t. You pronounce it better than I did. But that part of this too is people that are complaining about AI going to take jobs and ruin everything. But really there’s a side of that where if you were privileged enough that you could have the luxury to get into art and not have to worry about some other way of sustenance.

And now that all of the gatekeeping has been occupied. So I went to this, I went to Caltech and I went to this professor, and I know these different techniques, and this applies to music and artwork and acting and everything. But now you’re being forced to compete with like some random kid in Ukraine that just has access to an AI model and 300 hours of time, and they can just smoke you. They can put everything that you’ve been working your entire life over in the dust, especially if they have a good way to promote it. And the.

And usually when the argument is like, well, they’re just stealing everything, they shouldn’t be allowed to do that. We need some, some requirements and some extra protections around this. So people couldn’t do that. That it’s unwritten, that they’re saying, except for Disney, except for Sony, except for Universal, except for all of these studios that technically own the copyright to all this media they’ve been producing for over a century. If they just went walled garden and said, okay, we’re just going to train our own AI model based on things we own, because again, we don’t want to steal, so we’ll just train it on our own stuff.

And now the only people that would be able to generate that level of AI would be these huge conglomerate companies. So on. On that timeline, everyone that’s complaining about we need to regulate AI, they’re really making an argument for Disney to be the only one that’s allowed to do it without going in jail. Yeah, copyright is brain damage. And just like that, we’re full circle. Let me give shout outs to all of your great works. Again, everyone, if you haven’t seen it already, you should go and look at Cedar Sings the Blues. Seder Masochism. This Land Is Mine I think is another really popular one.

Copying is Not Theft. You can go and look at on YouTube right now. I think that’s one of my favorites. You’re on the Hetero Dorks podcast. You mentioned the Disabling Impairments card deck. We’ll put like a little commercial to Anne. I’ll put a link in the description. And right now you’re doing pre orders for that. So the more people that sign up to get a deck means that you can get that many more made. So definitely want to encourage anyone that wants more human artwork. If you want human soul in Your artwork out in the world before AI takes it all over.

This is one of your last chances before. But it’s so good you’ll think it’s AI Slop. Right? That needs to be in your marketing materials of that. Yeah, I just put a quote. AI Slop from whatever. Rando on Primal said that. What other projects have do you have coming out? Anything on the horizon that you haven’t announced yet? Now these. These cards have been taking all my time, but I’m super excited about having a Lora model that actually looks like my stuff. So I’m going to send you a bunch of stuff. Happy to. I look forward to this awesome Lore model.

In fact, now the archive can contain all the illustrations I did for the cards. You know, it only takes about 40 images. More doesn’t necessarily mean better anymore either. Yeah, well, maybe I’ll just give you the new images that they’re most representative ones that represent your style. We’ll see what Laura can come up with and then I’ll put out my own disabling impairments card deck for a dollar cheaper than yours. Okay, perfect. I look forward to. You’re gonna. You’re gonna have to pay to get it printed, so good luck with that. Just buy something Just buy something from Paranoia American Just buy something just buy something from paranoia Mirror get some merch buy some art Click that link Add to cars say it back need that print Nod your head give to consent buy a comic three or four think this thought I want more Buy a sticker from the store Think this thought I want more Just buy something Just buy something from Paranoid American Just buy something Just buy something from Paranoid American Paranoid.

No I scribbled my life away Driven the right page willing to light your brain give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel when it’s real to real you will engage in your favorite of course the lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hey, maybe your language a game how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the cause they are to shapeshift snakes get decapitated met is the apex execution of flame you out Nuclear bomb distributed at war rapid rather gruesome for eyes to see Max them out than I like my trees blow it off in the face you despising me for what Though calculated you’d rather cut throat Paranoid American must be all the blood smoke for real Lord, give me your day your way vacate they wait around they hate whatever they say man it’s not in the least bit.

We get heavy rotate when a beat hits a thing. Cause you’re well them for real. You’re welcome. They never had a deal. You’re welcome. Many lacking appeal. You’re welcome. Yet they doing it still you’re welcome.
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