MDAMAGER

MyNvoel.txt An exploration of creative ownership in the age of generative art https://vimeo.com/951006589   Abstract This essay is a post hoc exploration of the wider implications of something that I made with earnest creative intentions using data and computational processes that were available to me. While it is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of these topics, the overarching question I will attempt to explore is: Where are the legal and ethical boundaries of developing forms of generative expression, especially those forms which are necessarily built from the reconstituted raw innards of preexisting works? The primary purpose of this project is as a means of solidifying lines of questioning and outlining conceptual concerns that I believe will greatly influence the immediate future of artistic expression, both personally and among wider society. Ultimately this paper advocates the necessity for new cultural frameworks in order to address issues of creativity and originality within digital art.   Background In June of 2023, The Joseph Saveri Law Firm filed legal action on behalf of several prominent authors against OpenAI over their use of copyrighted text material in training their conversational AI model Chat GPT1. The lawsuit followed in the wake of other similar cases seeking damages against owners of generative text and image networks that are profiting from the unauthorised use of the work of others2. Uncertainty on possible routes of progression of AI systems have been enforced by the closed-shop nature of their development, but these lawsuits represent the early stages of galvanised societal action that attempts to address some perceived inequalities and issues of generative systems and signify the possibility of a major cultural change in our understanding of the ethics of artistic ownership. Regardless of the wider impact on society, the current technological paradigm raises a number of potentially dire hypotheticals due to the collision of two seemingly incompatible cultural viewpoints: On one side is a Tech based, new media and internet culture ethos, which ostensibly values collaboration and the power of explorative iteration3.and on the other is a lingering preestablished western cultural artistic paradigm that emphasises the value of the authority that is established through direct attribution and canonization. Tension between these two viewpoints is historically exacerbated by each of those cultures having to reconcile their own positions with the drives of the overarching capitalist systems that influence society4. What effect will ongoing development of generative artistic processes have on the purpose and value of the individual artist within the wider social, cultural, artistic and technological ecosystems? Attention is currently being drawn to this issue by prominent authors acting as a proxy for their publishers who have financial interests to protect.5 The wholesale societal rejection of these systems is not a solution, so how will they impact the working processes of the individual artist whether they choose to embrace them or not? Will these generative computational processes usher in a new age of cultural understanding of the role of the artist, and their position within the vast network of human artistic output that feeds all abstract creative endeavour?6   MyNvoel.txt The impetus for this exploration came about largely by accident, through idle creative experimentation with data and tools that were available to me.7 This project was inspired by a psychological phenomenon that has been colloquially referred to as typoglycemia8. I wrote a python sketch that utilises this effect by taking an input text, preserving the position of the first and last letters of each word, randomly shuffling the rest and reconstituting them back into an output. After initial experiments with short sentences, I wondered how quickly the script would be able to process longer texts, so I downloaded some Dickens from Project Gutenberg, fed it through my script and less than 0.2 seconds later9 I had before me a unique novel length string of text called “A Tlae Fo Owt Ctieis” that was purported to be written by someone called Clarhes Dneckis.10 While not a large-scale AI model, it is a generative process that works by taking an original text and turning it into something else. I wondered what someone might even call an artefact such as this. Is it a translation? An encryption? A parody? While undeniably a derivative work, it is a wholly unique output that is infinitely likely to have never existed before. It largely retains the ability to be interpreted as having an identical meaning to something else that it was based on, despite being identifiably different. Public domain status of the original text aside, my instincts tell me that my output shouldn’t be considered copyright infringement because I am not trying to claim I am a particular author, nor is it plagiarism because I am not attempting to pass off the work of another as my own. I don’t have adequate terminology in my own vocabulary to describe the ethical ramifications of what I’ve done. Hypothetically, what would happen if I were to have it bound as a physical copy and sold on the open market? Would its realisation as a physical object serve to reinforce the validity of its own existence as a commodity with a tangible, justifiable recoupable value? Where is the low threshold of modification for this primordial material I created that could justify the appropriative processes that led to its creation in the first place? How much more would I need to do to make this mine, and why? My instincts as a computational artist, rightly or wrongly, tell me that all data that I can access is mine to play with in the pursuit of my right to creatively express myself. I am personally an advocate of copyleft ideology11 which advocates for open, collaborative distribution rights, but much of western society still operates under a default capitalist cultural positioning that values the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, over the rights of the individual holder of the content of the produced end-user artefact. The reality of my situation is that I created a piece of art. A piece of information I picked up along my travels sparked a creative impulse in my soul, and I used my individual imagination and ingenuity to synthesise a wordless, matryoshka-like cascade of intangible thoughts into something tangible that has never existed before, and serves no intended functional purpose beyond being an aesthetic experience that comments on an aspect of society and evokes a desired reaction in those that view it. The fact that observing this artefact invokes specific thoughts of a previous work is, like all artistic expression since the dawn of time, an unavoidable fact that is predicated on the prior knowledge of the observer. I have produced an identifiably unique novel. The thread of this uniqueness is not superficial and runs consistently throughout the entirety of the piece. Is it a good novel? No. But that is irrelevant. There is a place and purpose for all forms of creative expression, regardless of the actual quality. There are arguments for possible future of expression that advocates for works such as these based on their potential value for innovation12 and these arguments sit within an older framework of understanding that embraces derivation as valid forms of expression13. Ethics and Legalities The stakes aren’t quite so high when applying this technology to older texts that have already lapsed into the public domain, so a more intriguing line of questioning arose from applying this script to contemporary authors, who could potentially have their blood sweat and tears stolen away from them in the blink of an eye by an industrialised process. Would my novel’s very existence be contentious enough to put me in the firing line of legal action? Would I feel a pang of indignant rage if somebody applied a similar process to a novel I had written and tried to sell it as their own object?14 In order to take this thought experiment outside the realms of public domain, I typed “harry potter text” into google and found a link to a raw text file of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone 15 which I copied and processed with my python script. What now are my rights regarding the output, if I even have any at all? There are several difficulties that emerge when managing the realities of copyright in an international environment such as the internet, and cultural differences are a barrier to establishing any kind of universal hegemony16. For this reason I focused my initial exploration on UK legislation in order to determine if there were any rules within the preexisting legal and ethical frameworks that could define what my work even is. When determining exemption of a particular work, “the starting point is to ask whether the alleged work qualifies as a work under EU law before asking whether the alleged subject matter can be accommodated within one of the CPDA’s [sic] categories of protected works.” as outlined in Shazam v Only Fools and Horses: A Critique of the Classification of Literary or Dramatic Characters as Independent Copyright Works. While copyright is an immensely complex area of law, it would appear that legislation does afford my unique novel does a definition as a work17 under preexisting framework, and there is a possibility that it could claim protection from copyright infringement based on certain exempting characteristics, such as its status as a transformative work of parody18 But aside from being able to potentially find legal loopholes that justify it’s existence, the legal frameworks also contains an underlying ethical logic that justifies this work as being the result of my individual labour19 Does the fact that I am simply an individual with an idea and a laptop somehow make the physical enactment of the labour of this process less ethically contentious than if I were a corporate entity doing it on a much larger scale? Conclusion Following the aforementioned ethical position that emphasises an individuals rights to the fruit of their labor, it would then stand to reason that the defining characteristic of validity regarding a work such as my appropriated novel, is how much work is put in20 A main sticking point over the use of generative processes that needs to be addressed is the scale of the gulf between what is legally acceptable from a production standpoint, and what is felt to be just from a moral and social standpoint. Approaching these questions from a purely legalistic standpoint does not take into consideration the wider ethical issues that emerge outside of a tightly defined legal framework. However, approaching things from a purely ethical standpoint does not consider certain enforceable rules of production and distribution that supercede what is merely considered to be morally or ethically right or wrong by society, so future developments in societal relationships towards AI will naturally be informed by general ethical understandings but heavily biased towards seeking balance against the preexisting legal frameworks that govern artistic ownership. In the coming months, years, and perhaps even decades, Court cases involving multi billion dollar corporations will mandate the use and purpose of generative AI and, with that, the future of the means of digital artistic expression for everyone. Without unfettered access to the raw data of human creative output, AI will not develop. As artists, particularly computational artists who have any interest in utilising generative AI within their work, we must decide whether we are willing to hand over a degree of our assumed divine right of absolute ownership of our own work in exchange for tools that expedite our processes for us, or perhaps even create forms of expression that we cannot yet comprehend. The idealistic assumption about the development of AI was that it would take on our work, so we could do other things. Presumably so we could utilise that extra time to do things that are not so prosaically imperative as working, but instead more beneficial to our general wellbeing such as pursuing interests and making more art. The great irony is that AI seems to be predominantly taking on our art, so that we, especially artists, have to do more work. More work to be seen, to be valued, to keep at the vanguard of an ever changing area of knowledge that is increasingly alienating and restrictive for private individuals. And perhaps most excitingly, or existentially worrying depending on perspective, more work to feel as though we are truly doing something. While I’m personally concerned by some of the implications that AI has for society, I’m also excited by the opportunities for radical artistic experimentation that can arise as a response to such uncertainty.   Notes 1 Saveri gave a public statement on the firm’s intent stating that the suits were undertaken on behalf of all authors as a means of “challenging the legality of large language models trained on copyrighted works without con­sent, compensation, or credit” in order to “continue the vital conversation about how AI will coexist with human culture and creativity.” 2 In september 2023, Andrew Albanese from Publishers Weekly reported cases are near identical in scope in that they seek “damages and injunctive relief, and puts forth six causes of action: direct copyright infringement; vicarious copyright infringement; a DMCA violation for the removal of copyright management information; violations of California’s unfair competition law; negligence; and unjust enrichment.” 3 This ethos is reflected in the cultural concept of a web 2.0 which was loosely defined by Tim O’Reilly in his article “What is Web 2.0?”(2005) as “a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites”. With the increasing ubiquity of societal interaction with the internet, the ideas that underpin the concept of web 2.0 are reflective of a much wider emancipatory technological paradigm that is currently unfolding. While initially devised to describe commercial possibilities for internet platforms in the post dot com era, Web 2.0 is broadly characterised by its emphasis on embracing individual participation as contribution towards a greater totality, and is “categorised according to the field of the producer” (“The Participatory Web, Blank and Reisdorf, 2012). Central tenets of O’reilly et al’s original brainstorm for the future of technological interaction included “participation, not publishing”, “hackability”, “software that gets better the more people use it”,“play” and “the perpetual beta”(O’Reilly). 4 This has long been a difficult balance to strike as the law, specifically copyright law and therefore the primary vector for western cultural understanding of artistic ownership as a whole, has largely developed to protect commercial and financial interests. While the means of artistic production are changing, protecting the commercial position of artistic endeavour has always been a concern. Historically, organisations such as the US National Society of Arts and Letters have attempted to formally address the gulf between traditionally accepted artistic values and the shifting sensibilities of the public. Writing on behalf of the NSAL in “Literary Copyright” , Charles Dudley Warner(1829 – 1900) expresses somewhat web 2.0 sentiments “It is believed that the advancement of art and literature in this country will be promoted by the organization of the producers of literature and art”, but it is clear that their primary intention aimed to achieve this by ultimately limiting the right to literary production, not just through legal protection against reproduction, but through a cultural system of social hierarchy and formal disapproval. While their first public address ostensibly claimed it sought to strike a balance between “Traditio et Libertas”, it also stated an overall aim to bring artistic production in line “with the action of other professions and of almost all the industries” by protecting the rights of the “The interests involved” and outlining a rigid, culturally approved social order of rights of “first, those of the author; second, those of the publisher; third, those of the public.” If liberty were a desired goal, it necessarily becomes secondary to tradition with such a hierarchy. 5 A major ethical justification for the current UK copyright laws is that they are a means of protecting the labour rights of authors which culturally orients a contributing factor of the overall validity of art along commercial lines. The more able to be sold or disseminated, the more valid its existence becomes, with legal viability of a piece ultimately dictating its acceptable place within society. The first legislation that established rights of literary ownership was The 1709 Statute of Ann and as Jane Wessel notes in Against Literary Property(2024) “It is a commonplace in the history of copyright that the copyright battles of the eighteenth century were brought to court by booksellers, not authors” with “authors themselves were conspicuously absent from the formal proceedings 6 McKenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifesto(2004) relates this possible trajectory to the overall processes which determine all human creative and productive endeavours as being manifestations of abstraction. “Out of the abstraction of nature comes its productivity, and the production of a surplus over and above the necessities of survival” “Out of this expanding surplus over necessity comes an expanding capacity to hack, again and again, producing further abstractions, further productivity, further release from necessity-at least in potential. She also notes the flaws will encounter as being a “hacking of nature, the production of surplus, does not make us free.” “Again and again, a ruling class arises that controls the surplus over bare necessity and enforces new necessities on those peoples who produce this very means of escaping necessity” as being built into the very abstraction of nature, proposing an expanding capacity to hack, again and again, producing further abstractions, further productivity, further release from necessity-at least in potential. 7 My own interest in generative art primarily involves text and music so I do a lot of experimentation with textual sonification as well as random and aleatoric writing and composition. I am also especially interested in transmutational properties of various forms of encryption and decryption. Particularly the tension between encryption and decryption that is reflected in the function of symbolic art that mediates between intention and expectation. On a basic level, in a literary context this manifests in our ability to view a sequence of words and unpack a deeper meaning that is greater than the sum of its parts. I personally gravitate towards forms of expression that exploit or subvert this tension in some way, be it through the use of satirical techniques such as irony, absurdity and pastiche, or by exploring forms where this tension can be embedded within the method of expression itself. My own explorations of these concepts are best evidenced by my work with oscilloscope poetry, which utilises sound derived from vector image position data to create music with embedded text and visual information, as well as generative musical compositions that convert text into midi data and rhythm to textual and poetic forms of expression. 8 Typoglycemia is the colloquialism given to the Transposed Letter Effect: A cognitive quirk of how we process language that allows us to infer correct meaning from words even if the spellings aren’t correct. This phenomena was first explored by Burner and O’Dowd in A Note on the Informativeness of Parts of Words(1958). To comprehend meaning from a word only the first and last letters need to be in the correct place. If the word contains the correct letters as the original, most readers can still relatively quickly and instinctively discern a meaning no matter what order they are in. Cdoinesr tihs stencene as an emxplae. The order of letters is objectively incorrect, but the reader's ability to interpret meaning is only partially hindered, the degree of which varies between individuals. 9 Console log from the sketch indicating a successful run: 10 https://www.mdamager.com/ATOTC 11 The concept of a copyleft can be traced to Richard Stallman’s 1985 manifesto for GNU licensing. Stallman notes on the GNU website the origins of the term: “In 1984 or 1985, Don Hopkins (a very imaginative fellow) mailed me a letter. On the envelope he had written several amusing sayings, including this one: “Copyleft—all rights reversed.” I used the word “copyleft” to name the distribution concept I was developing at the time”, a formal method of software distribution that advocated for creativity as a social contribution “but only in so far as society is free to use the results”. Copyleft ideology aligns with the belief that “the desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity”. 12 McKenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifest(2004) argues for the emerging class of creative that produces “new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data”, that deemphasises the innate value of the quest to create “great things, or even good things” and reaffirms the importance of the discovery of “new things” that comes from manifesting abstractions through the manipulation of raw material. “The workings of the world untied…In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old.” 13 As an example, William Burroughs advocated for public embrace of explicitly iterative artistic practices with his cut up methods and emphasises in his article The Cut up Method – featured in The Moderns Anthology(1963) - that these methods are still able to exist as unique works while honouring the source material they are derived from. “Shakespeare Rimbaud live in their words. Cut the word lines and you will hear their voices.” He also acknowledges these works sit within an inherent tradition of iteration within art that is a fundamental aspect of all creative abstraction. “All writing is in fact cut ups. A collage of words read heard overhead. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cineramic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color of vowels. And his "systematic derangement of the senses." The place of roescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms.” 14 “To find out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the field of insanity. And what we mean by legality in the field of illegality(Foucault, 1982) 15 https://github.com/amephraim/nlp/blob/master/texts/J.%20K.%20Rowling%20-%20Harry%20Potter%201%20-%20Sorcerer's%20Stone.txt 16 Currently, the legalities of creative and intellectual ownership in the UK are dictated by the The Copyrights Designs and Patents act of 1988 and are influenced by the 13 directives and 2 regulations that are enforced by EU member states. In the US, these rights are codified in the constitution. 17 Copyright designs and Patents Act 1988 defines a “literary work” as any work, other than a dramatic or musical work, which is written, spoken or sung, and accordingly includes— (b)a computer program;” This creates an intriguing situation where my sketch may well be afforded some degree of literary protection or even sociocultural legitimacy, even if the output it is designed to produce may not. 18 There are multiple provisions within UK law that afford certain derivative works exemption from being considered as infringing copyright. Parody is perhaps the most notable of these, The Copyrights design and Patents act states that “Fair dealing with a work for the purposes of caricature, parody or pastiche does not infringe copyright in the work.” Parody, according to Simon Dentith, as cited by Amy Lai in The Right To Parody(2021) “is bedevilled by disputes over definition,” (due to) “the antiquity of the word…the range of different practices to which it alludes,” and “differing national usages”. Lai also notes that “Parodia was more frequently used by Greek and subsequent Roman writers to refer to “a more widespread practice of quotation, not necessarily humorous, in which both writers and speakers introduce allusions to previous texts”. Dictionary definitions of parody vary, with multiple subcategories existing depending on the purpose, but a unifying characteristic in all definitions is that they imitate or allude to preexisting work. Lai also cites Linda Hutcheon who “contends that “the continuing and unwarranted inclusion of ridicule in its definition has trivialised the form”, as parody needs only to provide some degree of commentary on something in order to be considered as such. 19 The Philosopher John Locke was highly influential in the formation of early copyright laws. Locke was a vocal opponent of 18th century monopoly on printing books that was granted to the Stationer’s company by the Licensing Act 1662. Lai explains that “Locke holds that people have a natural right of property in their bodies and own the labor of their bodies as well as the fruits of that labor. Therefore, annexing or mixing one’s labor with resources found in the common gives rise to property rights or legitimate claims to ownership, if “there is enough and as good left for others.” It is easy to see how this line of reasoning applies differently to how it might have originally been intended in an age of infinite digital reproduction of intangible items, and allows for an interpretation that values protecting the rights of the labour inherent in artistic endeavour, whatever it may be, over the rights any given unit of artistic output. Locke fundamentally argued against wastage with the spoilage proviso in his Treatises on Government(1689) and Lai also cites Benjamin Damstedts assertion that the concept of Lockean waste applies “a unit of a product of labor is not put to any use… Limiting the ability of users to obtain copies of the intangible good therefore leads to waste.” 20 There are of course some chasmic holes in this line of reasoning. Amount of “work” is impossible to quantify, and muddied by the artists drive for efficiency in their own workflow. People are constantly achieving ways to perform their own artistic tasks with less resistance each time they perform them. The weight, effect and gravitas of work diminish with time as tasks naturally become easier to perform with time.   References Saveri, J. (2024) LLM litigation · Joseph Saveri law firm & Matthew Butterick, LLM litigation · Joseph Saveri Law Firm & Matthew Butterick. Available at: https://llmlitigation.com/ (Accessed: 28 May 2024). Albanese, A. (2023) More authors, including Michael Chabon, Sue Ai developers over Copyright, PublishersWeekly.com. Available at: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/93170-more-authors-sue-ai-developers-over-copyright.html (Accessed: 28 May 2024). O’Reilly, T. (2005) What is web 2.0, New Titles. Available at: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html (Accessed: 28 May 2024). Blank, G. and Reisdorf, B.C. (2012) ‘The Participatory Web’, Information, Communication & Society, 15(4), pp. 537–554. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2012.665935. Warner, C. (no date) Literary copyright. Project Gutenberg. Wessel, J. (2024) ‘Against literary property: Arthur Murphy and the copyright metaphor in eighteenth-century England’, ELH, 91(1), pp. 61–92. doi:10.1353/elh.2024.a922009. Wark, M. (2022) A hacker manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J.S. and O’Dowd, D. (1958) ‘A note on the informativeness of parts of words’, Language and Speech, 1(2), pp. 98–101. doi:10.1177/002383095800100203. Stallman, R. (1985) The GNU manifesto - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation, [A GNU head] . Available at: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.en.html (Accessed: 28 May 2024). Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 8, no. 4, 1982, pp. 777–95. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343197. (Accessed 28 May 2024.) Lai, A.T.-Y. (2021) The right to parody: Comparative analysis of copyright and Free Speech. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. Leroi Jones, ed., The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America (NY: Corinth Books, 1963). Copyright, designs and patents act 1988, Legislation.gov.uk. Available at: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/contents (Accessed: 28 May 2024). Locke, J. (1689) John Locke two treatises of government.doi:10.1017/cbo9780511810268. Damstedt, B.G. (2003) Limiting Locke: A natural law justification for the fair use doctrine.