> The five fundamental rights that the bill gives to copyright owners—the exclusive rights of reproduction, adaptation, publication, performance, and display—are stated generally in section 106.
Seems it can be argued that generative AI violates many of these rights. Again I’m not a lawyer so I’m sure there’s some historic legal stuff that impacts the interpretation - but taking a copyrighted work and allowing a neural network to adapt it in any way seems like a clear violation?
My belief is that generative AI probably breaks both the letter and the spirit of the law, but it also renders the law pointless because its existence, at whatever quality level, means there's no longer a commercial justification for copyright to exist to protect creative output of that level or lower.
But there might be an evolutionary/signalling reason (think peacock tail) that overrides the commercial.
The analogy falls apart when you consider that for instance stable diffusion was trained on 2.3 billion images, but the model itself is only around 10GB. That only works out to be 4 bytes per image. Clearly it's not the same as pointing a camcorder at a movie screen.
You could argue that training a model is essentially a lossy compression algorithm resulting a compressed artifact that can be non-deterministically decompressed.
If current AI's don't actually violate copyright law (doubtful) then they should be modified, since it is obviously harmful to actual creators and will likely result in shitty outcomes for existing artists, fewer future artists, and less compelling art overall. If copyright law isn't intended to protect artistry in the case of existential threat, what exactly is the point of copyright law, anyway?
I personally think an unstated goal of society is that it's primarily for the benefit of humans, and the major problem with AI is it ignores that. Art in particular is special, and if AI cheapens art, it cheapens the human experience.
I disagree with this, AI makes making art easier and by doing so, if anything it both increases the supply of art and enhances the human experience by enabling anyone to create art. As an example, my drawing skills are so bad that I couldn’t express myself visually before but now Midjourney enables me to express myself. I don’t see how that could be a bad thing.
Does it harm existing creators? Probably, in the sense that it enables new entrants to the market and creates more competition but that should be acceptable. We live in a market society (since every other economic form has been a failure) and we need to acknowledge that sometimes that means people get their livelihoods destroyed. If we start picking and choosing, who deserves to keep their livelihoods we fall into political traps which aren’t ideal (why do we care about artists but not coal miners?).
Another point I want to get at here is that in a world of abundant art, I would expect art to be more compelling. I don’t know about you but one thing I find a bit frustrating about Anglophone art is that too often it follows the same tropes and happens in the same locations. A world of abundant art can solve that.
> if anything it both increases the supply of art and enhances the human experience by enabling anyone to create art.
It increases the supply of derivative art. I agree to some extent it "enhances the human experience by enabling anyone to create art" in the sense that they can adorn their environment or works with pretty things that they like, but they aren't actually creating anything in the traditional sense.
Barring major rapid advancements, I expect art generated by AI (and anything else) to be derivative of what it's consumed. I wouldn't expect for it to develop its own style of painting or music, I would just expect to see the same stuff rehashed over and over again. Stagnation. That's not something I want.
I don’t think that it would be derivative — sure, for those who go to midjourney, try out a single query to feel good and then never generate another image it won’t be “art”. But these things already have integrations into photoshop and such, and a more collaborative between human and AI approach could easily result in actual art.
Think of something like, I asked for a portrait of a women, similar in layout to Mona Lisa, then click on some area I don’t like too much, and ask the AI to change it to something else. You don’t have to imagine many iterations before it could give you “real art”, especially that you are free to draw/edit/add layers at any step of the process, or even draw the initial sketch.
> Another point I want to get at here is that in a world of abundant art, I would expect art to be more compelling
I expect the exact opposite will be true.
Consider for a moment that most people who are naturally inclined to art, even with years of practice and training, do not produce much that is novel or of any real interest. If we’re talking about truly great art, even accounting for all the inherent subjectivity in that classification, it’s a tiny fraction of these people.
Now, let’s take masses of people with no particular knowledge of art or ability to reason about how good images are constructed and set them loose typing into “magic” image producing boxes, responding to whatever appeals to them in the most uncritical fashion imaginable. How would this make art more compelling? All it will do is make art “more” in the sense that food is cheaper and comes in bigger packages at a Walmart than a farmers’ market.
I have no idea how you make the law in the way that does not also punish other humans/businesses and give a massive windfall of power to large businesses that buy up copyright.
Should we also retroactively introdue laws to make shovels and pencils illegal? Those also made a lot of people obsolete. Let alone tractors and cameras. Do we have to go back to a time before the flintstone?
I don't know, is there something about not being able to dig or draw that is essential to the human experience?
It's funny to see people act like AI is just another simple tool instead of an unprecedented fundamental shake-up of how we think about intelligence, ourselves, and our role in society.
Same question for "data protection/privacy".