Don’t close your eyes. Plagiarise. Let nothing evade your eyes.*

Pablo Picasso, leading a gang of thieves, stealing paintings from a museum.
By Bing Image Creator (A.K.A. Dall·E 3)

"Good artists borrow, great artists steal" - Pablo Picasso 1881-1973**

Eki took clips from ‘Abilene Town’’ (I942IPD) and made LMP’s short political video ‘Showdown” starring Donald Trump. In 1980 Ronald Reagan first said, "Let’s make America great again". Trump copped it, dumped the limp ‘let’s’, made millions of MAGA caps and the rest is... But if you breach copyright infringements and get caught there can be hell to pay.

Note: Goldwater beat Reagan to it (The Orlando Sentinel, 1964). But the MAGA slogan was actually coined even earlier, in 1940 by Senator Alexander Wiley (R).

Joe Biden had to ax his first presidential campaign when he mooched phrases and mannerisms from a British statesman. Fareed Zaharia, a journalist for Time, CNN, and a contributor to the Washington Post was suspended after he copied text from the New Yorker. He wrote an abject new culpa ad and is back on the job. But his high-flying rep. is dented.

Now AI is under the gun. George R.R. Martin and a bunch of other writers have sued Open AI for copyright infringements. Chats GPT’s prequel to ‘Game of Thrones’ might have bruised Martin’s ego. I can empathize. AI wrote a couple of posts for LM’s blog. It kinda knocks your socks off when five no-error posts pop out of the machine in about three minutes. Plagiarism might take a new tack If you want to  know what comes next, ask  JANE AUSTEN AI.** *

* Tom Lehrer

** Lifted from “Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal” - Igor Stravinsky 1882-1971

*** Jane Austen AI - Instagram, Facebook, WHATSAPP

Sources: The Economist, New  York Times, internet, Elizabeth Nelson

Next week: MIGRANTS & the RIGHT WING: cause & effect?

Re: LMP post - FREE SPEECH: a small-town newspaper goes to war: The Marion County police chief who organized the raid on the Morton County RECORD has been suspended.

Note: The whole concept of the various artists suing the AI companies is, well, pretty much just bogus. Yes, the models are trained on existing works of art. But so are art students.

The idea behind the lawsuits, I guess, is that the models somehow copy all existing art (be that images or text), and then create a collage of them to come up with novel text or images. But that is not at all how it works. Instead, just like human artists, the models learn about styles, composition, and whatever, and use that knowledge to make new art.

Sure, the user can prompt the AI to make, say...

Game of Thrones in the style of Pablo Picasso (Bing)

...and it will happily comply. But so might an art student. Now, it's likely that the AI does a very good job at it. Perhaps better than a human would. But it is nevertheless new art, not copied from anything.

You can of course ask the AI to create a copy of existing work, and it may do a good job at it. So could the commissioned art student, or you yourself, if you have the skills. But even that is not a violation of copyrights. Publishing that image might be, but that's your fault, not the AI's, not the art student's.

In other words, if AI is used to make and publish work that violates copyright, it is pretty clear that the violator is the person using AI. Not the AI itself, or the company making it, any more than a company that makes canvas, paint, and brushes (or typewriters) is.