Handmade Tales
Some thoughts on AI, Harvey Pekar, and giving stuff away
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist-Pablo Picasso
One of the ways I save ideas about topics to post on Substack is to create animation using AI, to capture the essence of the idea I wish to post about. They’re like sound notes on a phone; some go to trash; some become songs. Anyone reading this or who has bothered to peruse my posts will see this quite clearly. They are meant as thumbnails; to highlight the content in a way that might pique interest to read it. Nothing salacious, gimmicky, or false-in other words, I’m trying not to create the dreaded “S-word.” And this made me wonder about some work from the past-how they came to be, how they were perceived at the time, and how they now sit in the culture.
One person who I’ve been thinking a lot about recently with regards to the use of AI is Harvey Pekar. Watch the film, American Splendor or any of his appearances on Letterman. If there is one creative from the past who I have no doubt would have used AI, it’s Harvey Pekar. Pekar famously used illustrators like Robert Crumb and Gary Dumm for his comics. If we play the time machine game, would we think less of his work if he used AI instead of hiring an artist? Would he be accused today of creating “slop?” Pekar’s dilemma of course, is that there is no such thing as a “Pekar style”-unless you count stick figures, which he claimed was the limit of his drawing talent. So what would he ask the chat box to draw? The style prompts I put in to create the image below were, “comic book style,” “alt-comics,” and 1970’s. So from where did the LMM learn this?
Pekar, being the crafty guy he was, probably would have been bitten in the ass with a law suite once, and then gotten around to hiring an illustrator, with the sole purpose of creating a “Pekar-style”that would self-perpetuate in an LMM as each new edition was created. This would track with Tyler Cowen’s idea of “feeding” the AIs: a proactive strategy urging writers, researchers, and content creators to intentionally produce high-quality, free, and diverse information for large language models to consume. And yes, it also runs head first into the whole Grammarly, “Expert Review” controversy.
It is interesting (and sadly revealing) to look at this topic through the lens of the old Free Software Movement and Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons. It is telling reading this now 25 years on. Idealism? Or was the current state of affairs so wildly unpredictable?
We at Creative Commons thought this was a kind of legal insanity — an insanity, that is, created by the law. Not because we believe people ought to be forced to share. But because we believe that many who make their work available on the Internet are happy to share. Or happy to share for some purposes, if not for others. Or eager that their work be spread broadly, regardless of the underlying rules of copyright. And these people, we thought, could use a simple way to say what their preferences were
Lessig was not naive or against ownership, as he notes in the contrasts to Free Software
Like the Free Software Movement, we believed this device would help open a space for creativity freed of much of the burden of copyright law. But unlike the Free Software Movement, our aim was not to eliminate “proprietary culture” as at least some in the Free Software Movement would like to eliminate proprietary software.
His current view is trying to thread the needle; sharing some of Cowen’s optimism, with some rules regarding copyright. Those old Digital Rights Management wars? Kid’s stuff compared to AI. And anything we try to do to mitigate the worst parts are only a digital Maginot Lines; easily breached by Claude and Open AI.
As someone who used CC to designate my work to be freely used (it was, a photo used in a health care ad) I would like to see the Creative Commons spirit brought back into this debate.
But I suspect we are fully hostage to the Ohlmeyer Rule. “The answer to all your questions is money.” What is sad is not the bad actors who have always lived by the maxim, but that it will move good actors into what has to be understood as an obvious defensive stance regarding their IP.
Me? I will do my best to be a good actor, but perhaps I need to brush up on sketching skill. The LMM is hungry.
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