When ideas become the new currency to pay for digital services. The halter clause of text-to-image

Open AI allows the “paying customer” to freely use the images produced by the Dall-E text-to-image, on condition that they indicate that it was created through the platform in question. This means, reading the clause “backwards”, that nothing prevents the company from limiting the rights of authors on the prompt —The description that users provide to the software to obtain an image.

Canva also recently activated the text-to-image functionality with the novelty that the images generated thanks to prompt of paying users are licensed for free to be used in marketing activities.

As in the case of the “data for service” business model or the one practiced by social networks on user-generated contentsome might say that the fee is “included” in the price, and that the services would cost more if there were not also this retrocession of rights on prompt. Maybe, but at least in the case of Canva this is not clear and, above all, even if it were, it would constitute yet another act of appropriation of human individuality that now extends from the expropriation of data to that of ideas.

The image generated by a text-to-image application is, in fact, protected by copyright from the point of view of prompt that generated it – that is, of the creative act – not because of the tool used. Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and, now, Canva’s text-to-image are, in fact, just tools. As sophisticated as you want, but only tools.

What makes the difference, however, is the capacity Human to write a description creative image (where “creative” does not mean the myriad of nonsense like “black and white ink sketch in the style of Frank Miller of a cute cat-chef in cyberpunk style, preparing sushi in a starred restaurant at the end of the universe for a Vogon group “).

Therefore, invoking the existence of some right of the owners of the platforms on the user’s thinking would be like saying that the owner of the chisels used by Michelangelo to sculpt the Pietà can claim some right on the work because without them the artist he could not have created the masterpiece. Obviously, this is not possible because the tool has no subjectivity, but it doesn’t matter. While the “experts” are wondering about “AI law”, the market pragmatically solves the issue with the “Swiss army knife” of copyright: the license to use. That is, a traditional, ancient, dusty but tremendously effective legal instrument: the contract.

Also thanks to the contract, Canva, like Open AI, conditions the freedom in the use of the software not only reserving the power to actively block prompt of explicit (but not illegal) content, and those that represent a stereotype or are affected by bias even if it is not known in the name of which rules.

This choice reinforces the fact that the “ethical” control over people’s thinking is reaching new and more worrying levels of pervasiveness. A small number of “ethicists” more or less unknown to the general public and probably flanked by legions of lawyers and jurists, have the power to decide whether or not one can use – no, on Dall-E it is not possible – the photographic jargon ” shot ”to indicate a shot, because the original meaning of the word is“ shot ”. As far as photographs are concerned, never mind, but it is clear that we are not talking about this.

The theme of the appropriation of ideas comes from afar. It goes back to the days of the alarms about checking vocabularies and spell-checkers. It was 2003, less than twenty years ago but it seems centuries have passed since I wrote that

“Generations of functional illiterates are being created subservient to the uncritical use of a single platform. Users who already use systems without any awareness of what they are doing. And so, when the spell checker says that the word “democracy” is not in the dictionary, they will simply stop using it without asking questions. And to think about it. “

Today, not only has this nightmare that seemed dystopian at the time started to materialize, but it does so in more frightening forms. Write a prompt it is equivalent to “programming” a Text-to-image platform and, even more so, an automatic translation system. But to do this efficiently you need to use the syntactic and grammatical forms that work best and not necessarily the most creative ones. The consequence is that the language bends to the needs or limitations of the software and is progressively impoverished. To what extent and when this will happen is not known. However, as the strategic choices of the masters of technology show, there are already the premises that lead to the loss of control over words, and therefore over thought, in favor of a small group of subjects.

We’ll talk about it in twenty years, as long as we are able to express ourselves in a way that humans understand, or if we have the right to do so without having to pay a license for use.