On AI, Piracy, and the Arts
When I tell an artist I work as an AI/ML engineer, I can see a smile that does not reach their eyes. My engineering colleagues see AI as inevitable progress, excited about the future and comfortable with six-figure salaries. My artist friends are hustling between gigs and watching their spotify streams make $13 a month. There is a widening gap, and it is not about money. It is about value creation itself.
Here's what I know to be true: Piracy harms artists. It breaks the social contract between creators and consumers, where a consumer's desire for free entertainment outweighs the creator's right to be compensated for their labor. When a film underperforms due to piracy, it's not the studio executives who lose their jobs first – it's the crew members who won't be hired for the next project. These aren't millionaires. They're sound engineers, composers, cinematographers, and editors trying to make a living.
That being said, if we want to critique piracy from first principles, we should ask: why do individuals resort to piracy in the first place, and who set that system up? Why do trillion-dollar corporations control access to culture, and why is it easier to pirate than to legally access content across platforms?
AI systems training on copyrighted works without consent or compensation devalue creative labor and make it harder for people like my friends to survive doing what they love.
But here's what I also believe: we're having the wrong conversation. The problem isn't AI tools – individual artists can use them creatively. The problem is corporations training AI on artists' work without compensation WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY making it impossible for artists to make a living. Both debates – piracy and AI – serve corporate interests by keeping creators and consumers fighting each other instead of questioning the system.
You either make it to the 0.5% in this industry or you can't survive. This is systemic, not about individual choices around piracy and AI. This is the real crisis.
The AI haters are just as extreme as AI worshippers. They are also at a bigger risk of fighting the wrong battle, where they spend their energy trying to uninvent a technology instead of organizing against the corporations that wield it. While they're boycotting AI tools, tech companies are consolidating power. My pragmatic stance: Understand AI and piracy as a symptom not a cause, but recognize the game is rigged.
Truth is... when has Art ever been an easy path? Jazz, rock, techno, drum&bass – every revolutionary art form was born from marginalized communities resisting the mainstream, only to be commercialized and sanitized by the very system they opposed. The enemy has never been the technology; it's always been the system that commodifies resistance itself.
As Thomas Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigm shifts require stepping outside the current paradigm's framework. This means you cannot solve problems using the same thinking that created them. Artists obsessing over copyright law and AI regulation are trying to solve a new-paradigm problem with old-paradigm tools. They're asking the system that's crushing them to protect them, using legal frameworks that were designed by and for corporations, not individual creators. The legal battle is a trap because innovation moves faster than the law. Copyright is already a corporate weapon – ask any artist who's been sued for sampling, or whose label owns their masters in perpetuity. If anything, fighting for stronger IP protections just gives more ammunition to Disney, Sony, Universal, and the like. By the time the law catches up, the landscape has already shifted.
We can’t stop AI, but we can ask ourselves what does it mean to be an artist when creation is no longer scarce. Artists used to be prosecuted for their message. Now they're tweeting #stopAI and that's supposed to do something. True artistic resistance has never been about protecting your output – it's about creating what cannot be commodified, whether that's community, experience, performance, story, or process.
In 1980s South Africa under apartheid, youth would blast kwaito and house music from car boots in township parking lots, scattering when police arrived. They made art in the cracks that the system couldn't reach. In late 80s UK, rave culture emerged in abandoned warehouses, with secret locations spread by word of mouth and pirate radio, organizers one step ahead of authorities trying to shut them down. In 1970s Bronx, hip-hop was born at illegal block parties with electricity stolen from streetlights. In early 2000s Rio de Janeiro, baile funk parties in the favelas created an entire musical movement the establishment tried to criminalize.
These artists weren't begging to legislate their way to survival. They were doing things their way, in the most DIY method possible, forming new spaces that couldn't be controlled. Youth inventing culture in the back of cars, in warehouses, in basements, in the streets. They used whatever tools they had, ran away from cops, and built community through the act of creation itself.
Amidst AI, piracy and all in between, I'm hopeful we'll see new forms emerge. Underground scenes building outside the system through alternative distribution, direct artist-to-audience relationships, and yes – using AI and other disruptive tools on our own terms. Isn't that how it always starts? Not with policy proposals, but with kids doing something the old guard doesn't understand, can't control, and definitely didn't give permission for.