Thought Portal

The silicon age is built on sand.

The things we love can disappear just like that.

Streaming changed everything. We pull from the cloud, not realising most of the content we buy is rented to us, not truly ours. Whether a Kindle book, or a film bought on iTunes; they can snatch it back in a heartbeat. Spotify's incompletion fucks with the canon, omitting beloved songs and albums based on licensing. Maybe a generation will grow up never having heard early Jay-Z, or Lana del Rey, deep cuts of Radiohead or the delights of Sapokanikan. Maybe their friends will never get into K-Pop. When George Lucas reworked Star Wars there was outrage; Disney makes stealth edits whenever it likes. People joke that future films and TV shows might just iterate - rush towards a deadline, patching ropey plot points and effects after the fact.

And cancelled artists don't have a chance. You had to burn a book, but a file's just gone. Maybe, like Amon Tobin, one errant sample gets your iconic track erased from the internet.

Because few people realise how delicate the cloud is. An outage freezes traffic, and one day might wipe out all those illicit remixes, all those emails, love notes. A million unprinted photos.

On a fragile internet, so much of our cultural wealth hangs in the balance.

All our beloved things. Tomorrow's dust.

Anyone who went into this weekend wondering if Dick Tracy knows how to use Zoom now has a definitive answer.

Late Friday night, Turner Classic Movies aired a mysterious new program called “Dick Tracy Special: Tracy Zooms In,” which features Warren Beatty reprising his role as the iconic detective from his 1990 film of the same name. Donning the character’s signature yellow coat and hat, Tracy participates in a Zoom call with TCM hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Leonard Maltin to give an update on his life and express his displeasure with Beatty’s film. (In this universe, Beatty’s Dick Tracy is a real person who exists separately from the film “Dick Tracy” and merely looks identical to the actor who played him in the film, which “Dick” talked about in the first TCM special from 2010.)

The three men watch several clips from the film together before they decide to call Beatty to settle Tracy’s complaints once and for all. Beatty then joins the call as himself, where he eventually reconciles with Tracy and they agree to have a more collaborative relationship in the event Beatty makes a sequel.

While the special was listed on TCM’s schedule in advance, it received no social media promotion and came as a surprise to even the channel’s most hardcore fans. Many immediately began to speculate that the show was produced as a way for Beatty to retain the legal rights to the character. Beatty purchased the rights to make Dick Tracy movies from Tribune Media in 1985, but Tribune tried to take them back in 2002. That led to a lengthy series of lawsuits that led to Beatty starring in the first TCM special. Titled “Dick Tracy Special,” it featured Matlin interviewing Beatty’s Tracy in a “Larry King Live”-style setting. In 2011, a U.S. District Court ruled that by making the special, Beatty had done sufficient work with the character to prevent the rights from returning to their original owners.

Sources confirmed to IndieWire that Beatty approached TCM about making the second special, possibly due to the rights nearing expiration.

Beatty has always been open about his desire to make a sequel to “Dick Tracy” and was still claiming to be planning the film as recently as 2016. The 85-year-old actor’s only movie since 2001 was his 2016 Howard Hughes film “Rules Don’t Apply,” so fans probably shouldn’t hold their breath about “Dick Tracy 2.” But at least now, Beatty won’t have any legal roadblocks if he attempts to make the film.

Additional reporting by Christian Blauvelt.

By Kashmir Hill

Published Feb. 13, 2023Updated Feb. 17, 2023

Robots would come for humans’ jobs. That was guaranteed. The assumption generally was that they would take over manual labor, lifting heavy pallets in a warehouse and sorting recycling.

Now significant advances in generative artificial intelligence mean robots are coming for artists, too.

A.I.-generated images, created with simple text prompts, are winning art contests, adorning book covers, and promoting “The Nutcracker,” leaving human artists worried about their futures.

The threat can feel highly personal. An image generator called Stable Diffusion was trained to recognize patterns, styles and relationships by analyzing billions of images collected from the public internet, alongside text describing their contents.

I’ve been following parallel media stories about visual artists in two different fields. Each story is about artists who create fantastical images, but they’re worried they can no long practice their craft or earn a living. First, a visual effects artist who worked with Marvel explains (as read by the actor Peter Grosz) why Marvel is so dysfunctional, and how the studio may be pushing the effects industry to the brink. Former VFX exec Scott Ross discusses how the system is set up to exploit visual effects companies and pit them against each other. Shifting focus from Hollywood to Silicon Valley. I talk with artist Steven Zapata about why AI image generating programs are an existential threat to artists, especially freelance fantasy illustrators. And Orbit Books creative director Lauren Panepinto explains why she doesn't think AI will be putting her, or the fantasy artists she works with, out of work yet.

Medieval Times union busting tactic 

https://www.tiktok.com/@medievaltimestherealone

By Sarah Andersen

Ms. Andersen is a cartoonist and the illustrator of a semiautobiographical comic strip, “Sarah’s Scribbles.”

7 min read

At 19, when I began drafting my webcomic, I had just been flung into adulthood. I felt a little awkward, a little displaced. The glittering veneer of social media, which back then was mostly Facebook, told me that everyone around me had their lives together while I felt like a withering ball of mediocrity. But surely, I believed, I could not be the only one who felt that life was mostly an uphill battle of difficult moments and missed social cues.

I started my webcomic back in 2011, before “relatable” humor was as ubiquitous online as it is today. At the time, the comics were overtly simple, often drawn shakily in Microsoft Paint or poorly scanned sketchbook pages. The jokes were less punchline-oriented and more of a question: Do you feel this way too? I wrote about the small daily struggles of missed clock alarms, ill-fitting clothes and cringe-worthy moments.

I had hoped, at most, for a small, niche following, but to my elation, I had viral success. My first comic to reach a sizable audience was about simply not wanting to get up in the morning, and it was met with a chorus of “this is so me.” I felt as if I had my finger on the pulse of the collective underdog. To have found this way of communicating with others and to make it my work was, and remains, among the greatest gifts and privileges of my life.

But the attention was not all positive. In late 2016, I caught the eye of someone on the 4chan board /pol/. There was no particular incident that prompted the harassment, but in hindsight, I was a typical target for such groups. I am a woman, the messaging in the comics is feminist leaning, and importantly, the simplicity of my work makes it easy to edit and mimic. People on the forum began reproducing my work and editing it to reflect violently racist messages advocating genocide and Holocaust denial, complete with swastikas and the introduction of people getting pushed into ovens. The images proliferated online, with sites like Twitter and Reddit rarely taking them down.

Getty Images has begun legal proceedings against the creator of AI art tool Stable Diffusion. Filed this week in London's High Court, Getty Images' action claims that "Stability AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright," and used these images for its own commercial gain.

This episode was written and produced by Josef Beeby and Andrew Anderson.

In 2018, voiceover artist Bev Standing recorded 10,000 sentences for the Chinese Institute of Acoustics. Bev was told the recordings would be used for a translation app, but three years later, she was shocked to discover that she had become the default voice of TikTok in North America. On TikTok, Bev heard herself saying all kinds of wild and inappropriate things. So, she decided to sue. In this episode, Bev tells her story, and we hear from the voice who replaced her.

This episode was written and produced by Josef Beeby and Andrew Anderson.

In 2018, voiceover artist Bev Standing recorded 10,000 sentences for the Chinese Institute of Acoustics. Bev was told the recordings would be used for a translation app, but three years later, she was shocked to discover that she had become the default voice of TikTok in North America. On TikTok, Bev heard herself saying all kinds of wild and inappropriate things. So, she decided to sue. In this episode, Bev tells her story, and we hear from the voice who replaced her.

What content landlords like Netflix are trying to do now is eliminate our “purchase” option entirely. Without it, renting become the only option and they are thus free to arbitrarily hike up rental fees 📈, which we have to pay over and over again without us getting any of these aforementioned rights and freedoms. It’s a classic example of getting less for more.

This new subscription lock-in model seems to me stacked in content landlords’ favor and has 4 deep (unintuitive) consequences to our society:

The fourth point is one worth investigating further. You may be aware that the status quo is for libraries to buy books & lend them to the public.

Have you ever sued anyone for copyright infringement?

I’m on this website Redbubble, where people design posters and t-shirts, and sometimes my gallery asks them to take things down and they will. So I’m not against copyright. But I don’t own a typeface. I don’t sue people. I will let all these corporations who are old-school robber barons do that. I think copyrights are euphemisms for corporate control on a certain level. Remember when Napster lost its first big lawsuit and the record industry thought it won? Guess what? It didn’t. We live in this digital universe. Digital life has been emancipating and liberatory but at the same time it’s haunting and damaging and punishing and everything in between. It’s enabled the best and the worst of us.