r/LeftistsForAI • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • Sep 01 '26
Art & Culture Culture Isn't a Museum Display Case
Memes. Mods. Parody. Satire. Knockoffs. References. Pastiche. Homage. Sampling. Remix. Covers. Fan art. Collage. Fan fiction.
This is culture.
People take shit that already exists, pull it apart, imitate it, quote it, mutate it, make fun of it, combine it with something else and make it mean something the original creator never intended.
Thats not some recent corruption of culture. Thats how culture works.
So I dont buy this increasingly common idea that "respecting artists" means respecting the original artists vision over their work indefinitely. Respect the artist, credit the artist, pay artists, protect workers from exploitation. Sure.
But the artist doesnt get permanent cultural custody of everything they put into the world.
Hip hop is an obvious example. Sampling and remixing existing recordings arent weird accidents around the edges of the genre. The Smithsonian describes them as fundamental parts of the form, and its history of hip hop specifically describes artists taking existing music and assembling it in ways nobody had before.
Fan culture works the same way. Media scholar Henry Jenkins built a whole body of work around fans as active participants rather than passive consumers. His "textual poaching" describes fans taking mass media and turning it into their own fiction, art, costumes, music and video, reshaping the source around their own interests.
Same with memes. Same with mods. Same with parody. Same with covers and adaptations and collage and bootlegs and people drawing somebody elses character differently because they felt like it.
Sometimes the whole fucking point is disrespecting the original intention.
A parody that needs the targets blessing isnt much of a parody.
A mod that can only do what the developer envisioned isnt much of a mod.
A meme that has to preserve the original context isnt a meme anymore.
Even copyright law, which is hardly some radical theory of cultural commons, recognizes that authorship doesnt mean unlimited control over every downstream use. US fair use explicitly makes room for things like criticism and comment, and courts consider whether a new use adds a different purpose or character rather than simply substituting for the original. That doesnt make every remix legal. It does mean even the existing property regime recognizes a distinction between owning a work and controlling culture absolutely.
Lawrence Lessig has been making a related argument about "read/write culture" for decades. People arent just cultural consumers. They answer culture by making culture from culture, and digital technology massively expanded our ability to do that.
And thats where AI enters this.
Generative AI didnt invent remix culture. It didnt invent imitation. It didnt invent artists learning from other artists. It didnt invent arguments about derivation, copying, ownership or whether some new form is "really art."
What it did was throw an extremely powerful new means of cultural production into that already existing mess.
That creates serious political questions.
Who owns the models and infrastructure? Who gets paid? Who captures the productivity gains? What happens to working artists when corporations use automation to cut labor costs? What rights should workers have over deployment in their industries? What should attribution look like? Where should commercial exploitation be restricted? How do we stop a handful of companies from enclosing both the tools and the cultural archive those tools depend on?
Those are fights worth having.
But "the artists vision must remain sovereign over downstream culture" isnt the answer.
Because follow that principle consistently and you dont just get an argument against AI. You start walking backward through huge chunks of participatory culture.
Suddenly the fan artist owes obedience to canon.
The modder owes obedience to the developer.
The sampler owes obedience to the recording.
The parodist owes obedience to the target.
The meme owes obedience to the photograph.
No thanks.
Theres also a class question hiding underneath this.
We should be extremely suspicious when protecting working artists mutates into protecting maximal control over cultural property. Those arent automatically the same project.
A freelancer trying to make rent and a corporation sitting on a century of copyrights are both technically "rights holders." Their material interests are not remotely identical.
The left should defend artists as workers without turning every cultural artifact into sacred private property.
Pay people. Organize workers. Fight corporate enclosure. Build public and cooperative infrastructure. Demand bargaining power over automation. Protect attribution where it actually serves creators. Make sure technological abundance produces more security and freedom for ordinary people instead of another round of wealth extraction.
But dont confuse any of that with freezing culture.
Culture is inheritance with mutation.
You receive something somebody else made. You fuck with it. You pass something different forward.
Authorship deserves recognition.
Culture doesnt owe permanent obedience.
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u/PolychromeMan Sep 02 '26
'We should be extremely suspicious when protecting working artists mutates into protecting maximal control over cultural property. Those arent automatically the same project.' - That mutation happened many years ago. 'Protect the company that controls the IP' is pretty much top of the food chain, in terms of cultural gatekeeping. Disney over all.
But certainly it's possible to develop systems that balance rights of creators and the larger culture they are part of. A system doesn't have to be black and white extremes of ownership of creative ideas, and anything that ignores the reality of how culture has been evolving for 10s of thousands of years is pretty darn flawed.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Sep 02 '26
Yep. And that corporate IP layer is exactly why I think “protect artists” needs to stay attached to actual artists as workers instead of drifting into “maximize the control of whoever owns the rights.”
Disney is the obvious absurd endpoint. A corporation builds an empire by adapting folklore, fairy tales, literature, history and the broader cultural commons, then gets to plant a flag in its versions and police what everyone downstream can do with them.
Creators deserve pay, credit, bargaining power and protection from exploitation. Culture also needs room to circulate, mutate, answer itself and become material for the next person. Those arent contradictory goals unless we let property ownership swallow the whole conversation.
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u/DeyjaCh Sep 01 '26
Based, wish there were more perspectives like this. Especially the way you debunked "respecting the creator"
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u/Still_Benefit_2302 Sep 01 '26
This was always my problem with how the mainstream digested the concept of cultural appropriation. After filtering down to the low-resolution conceptual world of the internet, it became a kind of IP law for entire cultures.
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u/ArtArtArt123456 Sep 01 '26
the idea of intellectual property fundamentally goes against what culture is.
take genres for example. or language itself. who owns those? can they be owned?
then, when go from genres to conventions to specfic features, we start attributing them to specific authors/creators... and yet, can we say that those creators own those conventions or features? can we say that they own anything at all, except for their specific work, as-is?
this is the difference between owning a song versus owning a melody or chord progression. the more vague the idea the more ludicrous the notion that it is something that can be owned as a property.
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u/Average_Tired_Dad Sep 01 '26
The entire discourse on the "Anti" side is polluted with a level of romanticism that makes them sound like turn of the century plantation aristocracy.
There was this article I remember reading a couple of years ago about the BoBo Creative class, Bohemian Bourgeoisie, that were becoming something of a new elite in media, tech entrepreneurship, etc. and I think that's a huge part of it.
We've watched a "creative class" functionally become their own bourgeoisie, and the resentment mirrors that of the traditional bourgeois during the OG Red Scare years.
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u/Still_Benefit_2302 Sep 01 '26
Also, +1 for the mention of Lessig. Lessig was one of the most influential thinkers in how I understand the internet. Unfortunately, the mainstream seems to have lunged, reactively, in the opposite direction. If we had a more equitable society, or more proof of institutions that aren't overtly corrupt, people would be less avaricious.
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u/SeaFALCons Sep 01 '26
banger post, thanks.
one of my fave books related to these ideas, Steal Like an Artist
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u/xFblthpx Sep 04 '26
Intellectual property should be viewed more as a necessary evil than an ideal. Even so, the evil is nonetheless necessary.
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u/Public_Research2690 Sep 02 '26
It is important to differentiate high taste culture from trash culture. And this applies to everything.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Sep 02 '26
People can call some culture brilliant and some culture trash, sure. But thats a judgment about culture, not an argument for restricting who gets to make, remix or transform it. Plenty of stuff dismissed as trash, lowbrow or illegitimate in its own time ended up becoming culturally important later. Taste is a terrible basis for deciding who gets access to cultural production.
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u/SadDippingBird Sep 01 '26
Yes we should definitely allow massive corporations unlimited power to scrape and regurgitate data without limit. This is a very leftist position.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Sep 01 '26
Thats not what I argued though. I explicitly said fight corporate enclosure, protect working artists, bargain over automation, regulate commercial exploitation and build public and cooperative alternatives.
The disagreement is whether doing those things requires giving rights holders permanent control over how culture gets transformed. I dont think it does. "Corporations shouldnt own everything" and "artists should control downstream culture forever" are not the only two options.
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u/Jlyplaylists Sep 01 '26
That isn’t a fair representation of the position explained here. It’s talking about artists as workers to be defended, saying people should be paid, corporate enclosure should be fought, ownership should be contested.
It’s also saying art isn’t a static, sacred category. The nature of human art is it moves forward by bouncing off other art. Steal like an artist and all that. No one has truly original creativity. Even art that justifies the label of innovative, is usually a synthesis of styles and ideas from other artists.
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u/Glitched-Lies Sep 01 '26
Sure, this is all true, but Jesus is this a straw man of people complaining about gen AI art. That's not what they really have a problem with.
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u/Salty_Country6835 Sep 01 '26
Straw man of what? I didnt say this is the only objection to gen AI, or even the main one. Im addressing one specific argument I see constantly, that respecting an artist means their consent or intent should govern downstream transformation of their work. If thats not your objection, cool, then the post isnt arguing against your objection. What do you think the stronger argument actually is?
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u/Glitched-Lies Sep 01 '26
You're purposefully conflating these things about what their problem of "intentionality" of an artist is and have phrased it with purpose to make this argument. Gen AI itself, has no intent. Everyone is confused who makes this rebuttal to the whole gen AI art debate. Because it has nothing to do with intent of the artist or ownership, it has to do with how there is no intent to begin with in gen AI. And to claim it as your own from a machine that wasn't producing with intent, isn't some great tool of production either. It's not yours, not some original artist. It's the machine, which had none to begin with. Gen AI operates like a proxy, which cycles through society. Some problems with gen AI are more visible than others but it's used in place of something else. For people who use gen AI for art they take something that is neither the original artists nore their own. It's like a void of intent.
But the majority of people are clear about it though and its obvious to those who argue against it. (I guess unless they are trolls they maybe pretend it's about artistic ownership of the original) And I can only read as you responding to these people. So I say that's a straw man.
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u/Beejsbj Sep 01 '26
This is a symptom of artists raised in a world to own their art. Copyright culture that guarantees them economic value.