I got to speak onstage the other day with one of my favorite journalists: Ina Fried, the tech correspondent for Axios. Her quick and concise AI+ newsletter is my go-to for daily news and info in the space. So I was genuinely sorta giddy when I got invited to the Axios AI+ Summit in NYC. I’ve done lots of press in my life, but it’s an extra little thrill to participate in an event I’d probably read about even if I hadn’t been there.
We mostly talked about an issue I’ve written about before — that creators deserve to get paid when their content is used to train AI models. Amusingly, the article (and subsequent pickup of said article) summarizing our conversation highlighted a totally unplanned thing I said.
"I'd love to be like a pure punk rock artist and be like, art isn't about the money," Gordon-Levitt told Axios' Ina Fried. "But on the other hand, what really happens if you don't pay artists is not a punk rock thing." He continued, "What happens is all the biggest corporate giants just own everything and control everything."
It’s true, when I was a teenager growing up in the 90s, I listened to plenty of Fugazi, NoFX, Operation Ivy, and other money-shunning bands both punk and punk-adjacent. But the idea of “punk rock” was about more than just music. Accompanied with appropriate amounts of snide irony, we would use the term to describe anything that just felt real, authentic, not caring what other people thought. Pretty much what “based” means today. Saying fuck you to the establishment.
Back then, if you were getting paid well to make music, movies, or whatever, that meant you were part of a big corporate system. But nowadays, everybody’s part of an even bigger corporate system, because even the smallest “independent” artists are posting their stuff on tech platforms owned and operated by some of the richest corporations in history.
And so today, to say fuck you to the establishment, it doesn’t make sense to shun money. It’s the opposite. People need to start demanding what they deserve. And, I would say this is, indeed, very punk rock. Because at its core, what punk rock has really always been about is a bunch of underdogs banding together and firing each other up against complacency. That’s what needs to happen now.
The big tech companies are in blitz mode, trying to claim that human creativity belongs to them, that they should have the right to steal a person’s work, a person’s words, a person’s ideas, and make a shit ton of money off it, while that person gets nothing. And, by the way, it’s not just the oligarchs in Silicon Valley, it’s also the autocrats in Washington. A few weeks ago, the US Copyright Office dropped a report saying it’s not legal for big AI companies to steal everyone’s content. Well, guess what happened? The head of the US Copyright Office got fired the next day.
Punks aren’t known for winning fights. Then again, they’re also not known for dressing up nice and speaking at tech conferences. Making a bright future for human creativity is an uphill battle at this point. Let’s turn up the volume and see what we can do. 🔴
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