A few years ago, an American friend bought a house in a European country in order to obtain an EU passport. (The country has immigration programs to help with this.) They say they are doing so in case the U.S. presidential election goes as they fear.
Neither they nor I doubt that if the wrong candidate is elected, America will descend into some form of authoritarianism. They and I are white, well-educated, non-immigrant, upper-middle class, with extensive networks and financially stable friends. Our demographic background is relevant to my question about the ethics of leaving a country with a dysfunctional democratic system.
As members of some groups that are likely to hold many concrete privileges and are least likely to be negatively affected, we have the opportunity to support those who will be more severely affected than us, Is there an ethical obligation to stay or is it ethically permissible to leave? — Name withheld
From an ethicist:
Goalkeeper Chesterton complained that saying “right or wrong, my country” was like saying “drunk or sober, my mother” . Murder), a loving relationship meant that one could not remain casually indifferent. I agree with his opinion about alcoholic parents and murderous offspring. But from my perspective, when true patriots say “my country, right or wrong,” they are talking about whether or not they agree with what is done in the name of their country. No matter what, it means it’s their country. That is the opposite of giving the country a free pass. It shows your commitment to helping your country do what it needs to do. That’s how we should normally feel about family too.
An expression of the feeling that you belong to a country, that it is yours, is the pride and shame you feel for what your country and your fellow countrymen have done. It’s a matter of national honor. Another sign is a sense of collective responsibility for the fate of the country. Leaving a country thinking it has gone off course is not really consistent with this sense of common responsibility and determination to improve the situation. Unless you believe that staying would put you at risk or that leaving would contribute to the reconstruction of your homeland (when France was occupied in World War II, Free French were reunited elsewhere) (How I left France for).
In my opinion, patriotism is a great thing, but it does not mean that patriotic self-sacrifice is a duty. If you are convinced that life here will become intolerable for you, you are morally free to go there. However, being morally free does not mean being morally honorable. You make it clear that this country has treated you well. Let me just say that people can have patriotic hopes for a country that has treated them badly. Frederick Douglass was an American patriot even though he was enslaved under the country’s laws.
I don’t share your concern that America is descending into authoritarianism. I grew up under a civilian and military dictatorship in Ghana. My father was a political prisoner. I think we understand the circumstances in which authoritarianism occurs. But if I believe what you believe, I confess that as a patriot I would like to stay there and work with others to help us recover from the disaster.
Reader reaction
The previous question came from a reader who is concerned about AI art. He writes: “My friends and I use websites for tabletop role-playing games (such as Dungeons & Dragons). When creating a character for a Lord of the Rings game, I found a piece online that seemed perfect. I found it. It’s a Celtic-style warrior in the style of Alphonse Mucha. … This particular piece appears to be only available on the Etsy shop, where the creator appears to be using AI prompts to generate the image. The price is nominally a few dollars. But I can’t help but think that the people who create AI-generated art are taking other artists’ work, essentially recreating it, and profiting from it. I don’t know what is the best course of action. ”
In their response, the ethicist stated: “AI image generators like DALL-E 3, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion have a sense in which they are leveraging the intellectual property of the artists whose work they have been trained to do. But the same is true for human artists. The history of art is a history of people borrowing and applying techniques and metaphors from previous works, with occasional moments of deep originality.… Forms of artificial intelligence become increasingly popular. As we move forward, we need to get used to the so-called “centaur” model, or collaboration between human and machine cognition. …I know that many people deny that artificial intelligence can help AI systems, viewing them as simply a parasite on human creativity. I think there is something wrong with this photo. ” (Read the full question and answer again here.)
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I really enjoy reading The Ethicist, and this answer was just as thought-provoking as always. In my opinion, the real question to ask when using an AI model is: Is the model itself ethical? Why are tech companies pushing so hard to introduce these services? Commercial models exist for self-interest, and unethical and immoral labor practices (OpenAI (e.g. reports of financial exploitation). Additionally, by reading these Commercial AI Model Terms of Use, you agree that they are not responsible for claims of infringement from the work they generate or for any situation in which the end user is not indemnified from such claims. Possibly. Is it ethical? Or is it business as usual? For now, from a legal perspective, generative AI is not copyright- or brand-safe. According to the Copyright Alliance, as of mid-2024, there are 25 pending lawsuits related to generative AI, including lawsuits brought by the very publications that ethicists are writing about. — Jim
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As an artist, I couldn’t agree more with ethicists about the validity of AI-generated art. I have spent thousands of hours in the studio, studying, working, and pursuing my BFA and MFA. I looked for artists to study with. Most nights I was in school, I worked in the studio until 11 or 12, while taking early morning classes. I studied anatomy thoroughly and passed all exams on the subject. Then I worked for years to pay off all those loans. For over 50 years, I have worked hard to deepen my skills and knowledge. People who use AI shortcuts are stealing from me! — Bepe
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As a writer and art historian, I think there is nothing wrong with selling AI-generated works, as long as the buyer knows what they are buying. I believe that AI opens doors, not closes them. — Betty
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I feel that ethicists have not spent enough time considering the ethics of how large-scale language models (LLMs) are trained. Rather than burgeoning artists honing their skills by imitating masters, they train as tools created by incredibly wealthy corporations that trample on artists’ tastes and preferences. I did not pay for the use of my work in a commercial enterprise. Moreover, in its training, AI did not adopt the “idea” of a job, but rather the literal job itself. (I believe this is akin to laundered crowdsourcing.) Users who currently use LLM tools to generate art are incurring the cycle of theft that allowed the tools to exist in the first place. I just keep going. — Olivia
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I’m an illustrator and educator. My work was published in the New York Times. For every cell in my body, I disagree with the ethicists’ answer to the value of generative AI art. Since my work was scraped by one of the popular tools, I believe this is not a centaur model and is a clear copyright violation. There are two obvious problems with generative AI art. 1) the use of expressive art by living/working artists (see recent European Union investigation into the use of works as copyright infringement), and 2) this is not how images are created. No one wants a visual artist to come up with a text and then a picture appears. There is no human judgment because each word in the prompt is part of a word-picture pair. This is the heart of the machine. It is a zombie nostalgia maker that produces an exploitative product (which is not drawn from our imaginations, but rather a road traveled) and bears no resemblance to cultural production. It’s ironic that the ethicist mentions the list of creators in the credits of Pixar films. The richest companies on earth are unleashing AI tools to eliminate these workers. Rather than providing the world with the tools of creativity, this movement is promoting technological feudalism. — Joe
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The ethicist’s response is that the use of AI technologies is not simply a matter of negotiating how they consume and regurgitate the work of real artists, but also how these technologies are financed and This ignores the fact that it is also an issue of how energy is consumed and how it is used. A much more insidious purpose than creating fantasy art. As an artist myself, I am often reminded of the words of Joseph Beuys: “You cannot wait for a tool that has no blood on it.” When it comes to AI, there’s a lot of blood in the blood that can’t be overlooked. Using these tools, even for insane purposes, disrupts the economy through bloated and misguided investments, accelerates the climate crisis through excessive energy consumption, and perpetuates dangerous systemic biases. Normalize industry capabilities. Instead, I recommend that the letter writer buy a sketchbook and take a drawing class to discover their own creative voice in a less harmful way. — Martha
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Is it ethical to profit from someone else’s work? Almost every idea is a combination of ideas that someone else thought of. So we are left with a compromise, and to me copyright law seems like a reasonable compromise. Just as anyone can write and sell a Sherlock Holmes story now that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s work is in the public domain, so too can you create an AI-derived work from a long-dead artist. You can create and sell images. If an artist’s work is not in the public domain, you will need to negotiate royalties. Simple and ethical. But I would never call the result of such a process “art.” — John
