The piracy debate is a distraction. The real question is not "is piracy moral" but rather "why do trillion dollar corporations control access to culture and why is it easier to pirate than to legally access content across platforms?"
The AI debate is also a distraction. The problem is not AI tools (which individual artists can in fact use creatively if done right), it is corporations training AI on artists' work without compensation WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY making it impossible for artists to make a living.
Both debates serve corporate interests by keeping creators and consumers fighting each other instead of questioning the system.
The real crisis: You either make it to the 0.5% in this industry or you can't survive. This is systemic, not about individual choices around piracy and AI.
My pragmatic stance: Learn to use AI, understand AI, understand piracy as a sympton not a cause, but recognize the game is rigged.
The AI haters are just extreme as AI worshippers. They are also at a bigger risk of
The AI haters are just as extreme as AI worshippers. They are also at a bigger risk of fighting the wrong battle where they spend their energy trying to uninvent a technology instead of organizing against the corporations that wield it. While they're boycotting AI tools, tech companies are consolidating power.
Truth is... when Art ever an easy path? Jazz, rock, techno, drum&bass – every revolutionary art form was born from marginalized communities resisting the mainstream, only to be commercialized and sanitized by the very system they opposed. The enemy has never been the technology; it's always been the system that commodifies resistance itself.
As Thomas Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigm shifts require stepping outside the current paradigm's framework. This means you cannot solve problems using the same thinking that created them. Artists obsessing over copyright law and AI regulation are trying to solve a new-paradigm problem with old-paradigm tools. They're asking the system that's crushing them to protect them, using legal frameworks that were designed by and for corporations, not individual creators. The legal battle is a trap because innovation moves faster than the law. Copyright is already a corporate weapon – ask any artist who's been sued for sampling, or whose label owns their masters in perpetuity. If anything, fighting for stronger IP protections just gives more ammunition to Disney, Sony, Universal, and the like. By the time the law catches up, the landscape has already shifted.
The question is not "how do we stop AI" but rather "what does it mean to be an artist when creation is no longer scarce?"
Artists used to be prosecuted for their message. Now they're tweeting #antiAI and that's supposed to do something? True artistic resistance has never been about protecting your output – it's about creating what cannot be commodified, whether that's community, experience, performance, story, or process.
Think about where real underground culture has always come from: In 1980s South Africa under apartheid, youth would blast kwaito and house music from car boots in township parking lots, scattering when police arrived. They made art in the cracks where the system couldn't reach them. In late 80s UK, rave culture emerged in abandoned warehouses, with secret locations spread by word of mouth and pirate radio, organizers one step ahead of authorities trying to shut them down. In 1970s Bronx, hip-hop was born at illegal block parties with electricity stolen from streetlights. In early 2000s Rio de Janeiro, baile funk parties in the favelas created an entire musical movement the establishment tried to criminalize.
These artists weren't begging to legislate their way to survival. They were doing things their way, in the most DIY method possible, forming new spaces that couldn't be controlled. Youth inventing culture in the back of cars, in warehouses, in basements, in the streets – using whatever tools they had, running from cops, building community through the act of creation itself.
I'm hopeful we'll see new forms emerge the same way: truly underground scenes building outside the system through alternative distribution, direct artist-to-audience relationships, and yes – using AI and other disruptive tools on our own terms. Isn't that how it always starts? Not with policy proposals, but with kids doing something the old guard doesn't understand, can't control, and definitely didn't give permission for.
Perhaps I sound too inspiring with little material reality. The uncomfortable answer is that most artists won't make money. That is true now and it was true before AI. The difference is we are losing the illusion that there is a viable middle class of creative professionals. The underground movements I am romanticising ? Most of those artists were broke. The difference was they knew the system was not going to save them, so they did not waste energy begging to it.
Do you make art because you want or need to express something that the world is not letting you say or because you want a career? Both are valid but require completely diferent strategy.
New economic models are needed. Patreon, Bandcamp, house concerts, teaching workshops, building genuine community where 100 people will pay you $10/month because they actually care about your work. They won't make artists rich but there are ongoing projects fighting for artists by taking things within their own hands.