You can’t clone creativity – so why is the PM condoning Big Tech copyright theft?
A FEW months ago an old uni friend of mine who enjoys dabbling in art like me shared a secret after I praised his photorealism drawings.
“I turn the photo I’m copying upside down,” he admitted to me. “By doing so, your brain doesn’t recognise the image you’re drawing so you copy the shapes and don’t fill in the gaps of what you think should be there.
“You should try it sometime,” he added in a WhatsApp message, sending me an upside-down image of Albert Einstein, if I remember rightly, to practise on.
“Perhaps,” I replied, thinking to myself that it all sounded too much like tracing or the old Paint by Numbers artwork for my liking. “I’m not sure I’ve got the patience, though,” I added. “I’m well aware that my sketches aren’t lifelike, but I rather like sharing my view of the world with people who see my drawings.
“I like adding my personality to a subject so others can see what I’m seeing.”
My friend agreed that he could understand my thinking but – even though he’s quite capable of drawing the right way up – he lacked the confidence in himself as an artist so kept turning his photos upside-down.
And I, the awkward cuss that I am, continued to draw the right way up.
In truth, we could have both found a middle ground by alternating drawing and painting the right way up or not, because – although the creative arts are messy – you can only become truly expert in them if you’re disciplined too.
I don’t spend a lot of my time drawing and painting but I do know that good draughtsmanship takes accurate measurements along with a keen eye to determine shapes and colours. I just love giving it a go.
In life, I have sought comfort in my artwork when I’ve been at my lowest ebb.
Drawing and painting acts as therapy for me – a time to indulge my creativity and forget my seemingly ever-increasing worries in this crazy world.
This is my opportunity to fully express my individualism and self-worth to friends and family which is why it seems so ironic to me that Big Tech – which prides itself on neoliberalism and quirkiness – wants to clone people’s creativity.
So what happened to the peace-loving hippies of the Sixties who sought self-expression by breaking free of the old patriarchal Western society?
Did they – like the American poet Richard Brautigan – believe in a global utopia where computers and humans lived together in harmony All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace* in Silicone Valley, California?
Nowadays, I, for one, just want to escape our Artificial Intelligence dystopia.
Of course, anyone who follows Adam Curtis’s disturbing, but insightful, BBC documentaries on the excesses of laissez-faire economics can see how quickly today’s moneymen (and women) commodified the World Wide Web.
I would argue that former UK Conservative MP Maggie Thatcher was wrong in the Eighties to declare: “There is no such thing as society”. In modern-day Britain, buying, selling and researching online, and interacting with like-minded users on social media and gaming platforms is our modern-day collective addiction.
Today,“the elite” keeping us hooked in our virtual world – instead of the real one – aren’t only the plummy-voiced aristocracy but, often, the rebel teenagers of the Swinging Sixties and Seventies who poked fun at fuddy-duddy oldies.
And don’t forget the leftie working-class Grammar School boys and girls of the Fifties, who became our university intelligentsia and “champagne Socialists”.
Of course, these middle-class Labour supporters are only too happy to educate the unenlightened on the Manchester’s Peterloo Massacre and Dorset’s Tolpuddle Martyrs, when Luddites smashed up machinery in the Agricultural Revolution.
So why are they supporting British Labour PM Keir Starmer by turning a blind eye to our ordinary, hard-working creatives who simply want to protect their time-consuming work from AI by upholding long-established copyright laws?
Worryingly, it seems that AI is going to play a major role in the future delivery of NHS services across Britain. Give me a local GP or a district nurse making home visits on their sit-up-and beg bikes instead any day of the week!
All I can say is that the post-Second World War Labour Minister of Health and NHS founder Aneurin Bevan must be turning in his grave as a Welsh coal miner’s son and former miner and union man himself.
It begs the question, what’s next for the NHS? Will we soon be saying “hello Dolly” to not just another cloned sheep but to a real-life human-being?
Anyhow, enough of this madness. As a child of Sixties Britain, I was an avid follower of the BBC art programme Vision On. At the time, I cannot remember submitting a drawing or painting of my own in the hope it would be showcased on Tony Hart’s Vision On gallery . But now I’m writing my own blog, there’s no one but myself to judge whether my artwork is worthy of hanging on the wall.
In general, I don’t draw or paint alone at home but I join fellow classmates for classes at the Rose Green Art and Craft Centre in a village on the outskirts of Bognor Regis.
Over the past two years, I’m mainly copied paintings and drawings by real artists but, as they say, practice makes perfect, doesn’t it?
I hope you enjoy viewing my blog gallery below:
Some of my original artwork plus party invites I drew way back in the Nineties
- Adventures in Amsterdam on my 1984 stopover to Cold War Berlin
- Weekly Facebook Round-Up: Law, order, and personal Insights
- Isn’t it time to change? My weekly news round-up is challenging you to ask whether the “law is an ass!”
- Hunston parish councillors discuss flooding and crackdown on drugs at March meeting
- My news in brief: A round-up of last week’s FB commentary
I’m fully supporting the News Media Association’s Make it Fair Campaign and would ask you to join us by writing to your local MP to ensure creatives are rewarded properly so as to ensure a sustainable future for AI and the creative industries. See images below:
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