Meet altMan & Swooper
Your friendly neighbourhood 24/7/365 privacy invasion & data laundering service
I started making comics again. Before and besides tech and innovation consultancy, it’s what I do. Lately it feels important. If nothing else to prove that human parody is still alive and well, even out here in the permaweird of late stage techno-oligopoly. It’s sometimes hard to keep fiction stranger than truth, but never has truth been in as short supply and in so dire need of boosting.
We have never seen a larger concentration of power in the history of mankind. Nor, arguably, in less deserving hands.
Paraphrasing Calvin & Hobbes here is a tribute — partly to demonstrate the difference between a tribute and plagiarism, partly to nudge at the fact that DallE3 happily ingested enough of Bill Watterson’s work to pull off a bad imitation, which is absolutely guaranteed to be against the will of that famously licensing-averse artist:
Oh MAMA! Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon’s server fortresses have slurped up every piece of content on the internet, including private conversations and proprietary data in pirate collections, and now claim commercial rights to create directly competing derivatives out of all of it, in the form of pirate blobs with a license to commercialize, and content rental services with all rights reserved to inputs as well as outputs.
Pirate upstarts paved the way by breaking data sourcing taboos, and Big Tech were quick to adopt their talking points and jump in for a cut of the action. Apparently everything down to the bottom of your sock drawer is now Public Domain. Or so they try to convince us.
Theft was followed by exploitation of ghost workforces in low-income parts of the world, to perform the most demeaning and psychologically damaging dirty laundry.
The social and marketplace platforms that sit on top of the Big Tech datacenter fortresses all laid similar grab-bag claims to your stuff. X, Adobe and Shutterstock have all opted in all content by their contributors to create competing derivatives, without as much as “offering” an opt-out.
They rather convince you that their amazing robot God-mind conjured it from thin air after being “inspired”.
By offering their products for free for a limited time, they build an army of advocates for this as somehow fair use and “democratization,” despite bulldozing universal fundamental rights to consent, credit and compensation on the part of the citizens, authors and artists whose works and faces were taken. Last time I heard, democracy was a political idea, and redistribution was, well, redistribution.
And to the anointed recipients of this GPU-powered bounty, model makers and publishers give any number of convoluted reasons why replacing artists with unlicensed direct derivatives of their own work, in their name, is fair use. To see that careening train wreck in action, just head on over to CivitAI, Promptbase, MidLibrary or ArtVy. Or why not their outlets: Amazon Kindle, ArtStation, Etsy or Adobe Stock.
So what until last year looked like a mutually beneficial (if lop-sided) arrangement – posting quality content for audience-building and marketing – has been flipped on its head in a historically unprecedented rug-pull.
OpenAI and Stability claim ethical high ground by offering a way out from their particular maws – in the next version – while their products are busy flooding every display window and marketplace they plundered with competing derivatives of the works they took.
And here we are. But resistance is mounting. Coders were first to sue OpenAI. Next were the Artists. Following a spring where every Guild across the world spoke up, four rounds of Authors and two rounds of Citizens have joined. Glaze was followed by Nightshade.
In total, there are already 150+ lawsuits, regulatory probes, national bans etc against the degenerative AI companies who claim everything on sight, and who fight us in court and lobby legislators rather than pay anything back. But people are waking. The tide is turning.
altMan and Swooper is my humble attempt at lampooning this historic battle for universal fundamental rights. Well, one side of it. Delusional tech billionaire weirdos may be cheap targets, but I’m here for it.
Sunday pages like the above chronicle developments from last year on from an artist perspective. I’ve written more, and will draw more if and when I find a publisher. Strips and one-off cartoons will pop up here and there on this blog.
Enjoy this sample, let me know what you think in comments, and do feel free to forward to mission-aligned potential publishers out there, and anyone who can use a laugh in these bizarro-world times.
– Johan
Thanks! Good idea. Posted in an art group. Feel free to post in others.
So funny & dripping with sarcasm - Share it on Reddit, especially on PhD subreddit & the like. Visual memes that simplify esoteric content can go viral.