I’m so glad they are following the rules on dress code. Where would we be if a government department with the power to destroy lives ignored the rules?

Nobody who is mad at this situation thinks that taking inspiration, riffing on, or referencing other people’s work is the problem when a human being does it. When a person writes, there is intention behind it.

The issue is when a business, owned by those people you think ‘demonised’ inspiration, take the works of authors and mulch them into something they lovingly named “The Pile”, in order to create derivative slop off the backs of creatives.

When you, as a “professional”, ask AI to write you a novel, who is being inspired? Who is making the connections between themes? Who is carefully crafting the text to pay loving reference to another authors work? Not you. Not the algorithm that is guessing what word to shit out next based on math.

These businesses have tricked you into thinking that what they are doing is noble.

No I don’t, but we’re not talking about a single copy of one book, and it is grovellingly insidious to imply that we are.

We are talking about a company taking the work of an author, of thousands of authors, and using it as the backbone of a machine that’s goal is to make those authors obsolete.

When the people who own the slop-machine are making millions of dollars off the back of stolen works, they can very much afford to pay those authors. If you can’t afford to run your business without STEALING, then your business is a pile of flaming shit that deserves to fail.

You’re right, each of the 5 million books’ authors should agree to less payment for their work, to make the poor criminals feel better.

If I steal $100 from a thousand people and spend it all on hookers and blow, do I get out of paying that back because I don’t have the funds? Should the victims agree to get $20 back instead because that’s more within my budget?

I read the comic as metaphorical for the state of the world in general, not a literal attack on low-income, undereducated individuals.

We fought the nazis less than 100 years ago. We lost loved ones in the fight against tyranny. We brought that victory, and that trauma, home with us. But in the decades since, the number of people who lived and fought in those times is dwindling. All that we are left with today are the symbols of that time. Yes, there are plenty of us that know the history, that have heard the stories. But there are also plenty of us that have only seen the sleek, manicured projection of the ‘bad guys from Indiana Jones’ through the Hollywood lens. And some of that trauma has been passed down too.

I feel like this comic is more about forgetting our own history.

As if the next step in the plan isn’t reinstating “state’s rights”…