mini (adj.)
via merriam-webster
- small in relation to others of the same kind
- of short length or duration; brief
manifesto
(noun) plr. manifestos, manifestoes
via merriam-webster
- a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer
minifesto (noun) plr. minifestos, minifestoes
via pansyseed
- a small written statement publicly declaring the writer's views on a given topic
- a manifesto in miniature
minifestos
keep in mind the us-centricity of my experiences and therefore my writing. feel free to link, copy, redistribute, and share. ♡
anti-ai
i find many of the moral arguments against ai to be either misinformed, misguided, or lacking in nuance. even arguments with which i might otherwise agree are often so poorly formed and overapplied as to hit perfectly legitimate tools and activities as collateral damage, especially actual accessibility devices (which generative ai is not). the broader anti-ai movement tends toward near-puritanism--which leads to witch hunting more often than i would like it to, as a lover of parallel structure, the humble em-dash, and lists of three.
that said, i am still anti-ai. so, why is that?
i tend to favor what i consider a more "spiritual" argument against ai. that is: i am against ai because i think it is soulless. to me, art is anything that a human makes intending for it to be art, and the element of direct human involvement is the most important part. the human prompt writer did not "create" the ai "art" they prompted anymore than i "wrote" a book my fiancee created based off of an idea i gave them, or "made" an art piece that i thought "wouldn't it be cool if..." about. an idea is not, in itself, art. you--and i do mean you, as in a real person--have to create it.
this is also how i can consider myself broadly anti-ai and still be a fan of vedal987 & neuro-sama. neuro & evil have fingerprints all over them, and vedal openly values his employees and contributors. despite the base of the project being a large language model, there is an unmistakable soul to the neuro-sama project.
environmental impact
other
anti-intellectual property
more has been said better than i can against the copyright and intellectual property system, so i'll direct you to the further links and not try to restate the ideas here. however, one element that is not explored in the anti-copyright readings below is that of plagiarism. i will attempt to expand on that some, because i think it is an important element of my personal anti-intellectual property framework, and likely a prominent rebuttal to those newer or hesitant to the idea.
the long and short of it is this: plagiarism is not illegal. plagiarism is not a violation of intellectual property law, at least not inherently, and at least not in the united states. there are cases where it is also copyright infringement, and there are (albeit rarely) cases where it is considered fraud, but, on its own, plagiarism is an academic and colloquial concept, not a legal one.
what plagiarism is, however, is unethical; it is disrespectful, often it is exploitative, sometimes it is even malicious. it is often exactly the type of thing of which people who kneejerk against the idea of copyright abolition are afraid. and yet, it is still not a crime. so it is exactly the kind of thing copyright "protections" will not protect you against.
copying, in the sense described both in the readings below and within the legal framework, does not necessitate plagiarism. you can copy and redistribute, even without attribution, without claiming a given work as your own. you are likely already familiar with this, as it is the very nature of many staples of the indie web: buttons, blinkies, stamps, ascii art, copypastas, memes, to name just a few. this is what copyright exists to prevent.
we need, urgently, to decouple our ideas of morality from our ideas of legality. this is only one way in which this is obvious today. you can likely think of countless others without my prompting. thus, i advocate for community solutions to plagiarism, rather than misplacing trust in a system built only to protect corporate interests--not artists, and certainly not art. you need not accept plagiarism to be anti-intellectual property. indeed, it is a reason to be even more so.
anti-copyright
plagiarism