Eric Shoemaker

The recent swell of public interest in AI image generating software, such as Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and Stable Diffusion, has led to a great deal of consternation among conventional visual artists. Understanding that the process through which these machines generate images depends ultimately on a machine learning process that involves the use of copyrighted artworks, has led many artists to allege that AI art is theft. There has already been a substantive debate in the literature concerning whether this use of copyrighted material by AI image generating software constitutes copyright infringement in the United States. However, the artists’ complaint appears to be a moral claim, rather than a legal one. In this paper, I will argue that these artists are essentially mistaken. Their copyrights should not protect them from this use of their art by AI image generating software. While I am sympathetic to the claims that this technology will harm visual artists, and that there should be some kind of protection afforded to artists against that harm, that harm is not caused by anything analogous to theft.

For a given decision, when an undemocratic procedure would result in a good outcome, and a democratic procedure would result in a bad outcome, which decision procedure ought we to use? Epistemic democrats, such as Joseph Schumpeter, argue that all else being equal, we should prefer the procedure with the good outcome. Schumpeter’s argument for this position is that we must reject the view that only democratic procedures matter when evaluating government institutions (pure proceduralism), and the only alternative to pure proceduralism that can coherently describe the relationship between democracy and the public interest is pure instrumentalism. I argue that Schumpeter’s argument for epistemic democracy does not succeed. In this paper, I outline three alternative ways of conceiving of the relationship between democracy and the public interest, which I call evaluative dualism, impure instrumentalism, and impure proceduralism. I explain how, with any of these three alternative views, we can evaluate government institutions without rejecting the intrinsic value of democratic procedures or the public interest.

In this paper, I argue that on an equality-based theory of democracy's value, randomly selecting legislators is more democratic than electing them. In sections 1 and 2, I describe how a legislature composed of randomly selected legislators might operate and what an equality-based theory of democracy's value consists in. In section 3, I evaluate arguments made in support of election-based democracy by democratic theorists and demonstrate why these arguments fail on their own terms. In section 4, I argue that when compared to electing legislators, randomly selecting legislators better answers to four democratic ideals embedded in equality-based theories of democracy's value.

I argue that the use of elected political representatives undermines the political equality of citizens. Having elected representatives politically stand-in for individual constituents makes ordinary citizens the political inferiors of their representatives. This in turn creates democratically problematic social inequality between elected politicians and their constituents. I then offer an alternative to representative politicians that does not face the avatar of the people problem: representative mini-publics. Through these bodies, we can achieve a representative system without a class of political elites, where citizens share the responsibilities and powers of government as equals.