Because I’m a nerd with nothing better to do on Christmas, I’m lying on my couch thinking about the ethical implications of AI and copyright and how it might just force us to overhaul the whole concept of copyright whether we want to or not

A (short) thread
Let’s start with “why do we have copyright?” Not how did we get here but “what is the purpose”? Basically it’s just a social agreement that if I put a bunch of work into making an artistic thing, you’re not allowed to just reproduce that thing and start selling it or using it.
This is the intellectual equivalent of theft because you’d be diluting the value of my work and forcing me to compete without having done 1/1000th of the production work that goes into it. This is good because it incentivizes art... probably. I might need to think about it more.
Fair use says you can use small portions of my work for a specific subset of things, but you can’t just copy my book/song/exe file and start shilling it yourself.

You’re robbing me of all the effort that went into production.

But there are gradations here too.
There are lots of things you can do that are basically copying my art or product but not quite copying it. Your song can sound similar to mine. You can knock off my game mechanics. You can write a fantasy novel with basically the same plot as mine.
While not illegal, we tend to look down on this practice in general. It’s perceived as less good than the original (usually) because it’s derivative unless it does something new and interesting that spins the model again.

Spinning the model and making something new is good art.
Amanda Palmer talks about this in the art of asking. All art is basically taking your experiences with other art and with your life and putting it in a blender at some setting between rough chop and liquify. You CAN’T make art that isn’t derivative in some way of other art.
And in fact this is basically something like what genre fiction IS. Have you read a new trash romance or fantasy novel lately? If you pick one at random I can probably give you a broad sketch of the plot without even looking at the cover and be 80% correct.
I’m not a copyright lawyer by any means and I don’t really know the legal boundaries of permissibility, but I get the sense that there’s a line where things stop being derivative and start being considered original even if they closely resemble the thing, but where?
Obviously I can’t take an Anne Rice novel, change the names, and start selling it. I can’t just trace an outline of an artist’s work and use it in my game. I can’t just lift your game’s art assets even if I make a totally different game.
But I can create original work that _basically_ does any of these things abstracted only slightly. If I draw original art that basically looks the same as your art, it’s still my art. If I compose original music that sounds so similar to yours people assume it’s your song, fine.
There’s a little bit of a ship of Theseus problem here where we have to sort out where that line is when it moves from too derivative to original, but I assume we have centuries of precedent answering that question and drawing those lines.
But an interesting angle here is that things that allow you to bypass copyright law seem to involve _effort_. We had copyright law even before things could be produced digitally, so it seems that what we care about is an _equivalent_ level of effort to making the original.
Or at least close. I can start by tracing your art or using your plot as a structure (Twilight > 50 Shades) but I still have to actually go make the book or the drawing. I put work in. I’m not stealing yours entirely (and I can’t be entirely original anyway).
With AI, things get very interesting, especially as it starts getting better at generating new work. What AI creates is actually likely to be MORE different from the original work than many derivative works we’re fine with people selling, so at first glance it seems obviously ok.
But if you take a step back and think about it, the effective process is extremely similar to the process of copy-theft. You’re taking someone else’s work and doing a tiny fraction of the work involved with making the original to produce something saleable that competes with it.
And arguably might compete with it even better than if you had just knocked it off and started selling bootleg copies of it! The authors guild wouldn’t be upset about text gen if it didn’t represent a serious threat to their work from people with less skill and time invested.
So this seems to violate the effort test that can generally be applied to even low effort knock offs. It might take 50% of the work but that 50% is still good enough.

If I can press a button and benefit from your work in a way that competes with you, this feels like a violation
James also points out here that there’s a willful element involved: but I think this doesn’t quite hold water because the 50 shades gal knew she started with a twilight knockoff and game companies do this all the time when they copy a game model. https://twitter.com/jamesjyu/status/1342633309650575360
Plus, if you’re using an AI to augment your work, you probably (or should) know that it was trained on other people’s work to get to the point where it makes beautiful art for you.

It looks very very similar to theft from a practical and mechanical perspective, ignoring the art
And it almost entirely comes down to effort. You’re not stealing from any one person though. You’re stealing a very tiny bit of substance or knowledge or technique from thousands and thousands of people.

The BitTorrent P2P piracy model of art creation.
But wait! Now that I steelmanned the complaint, take a moment to think about what this looks like: the process I just described is also exactly what every single artist does when they CONSUME other art. Where do your blender ingredients come from?
Well they come from all of the other art you’ve experienced, which is why people who read a particular romance author a lot tend to emulate aspects of her work when they go to write their own book and generate a novel twist. This is the artistic process in action.
Every single artist steals a little bit from all the other artists whose work they enjoy whether they intend to or not. Palmer’s Blender describes the low fidelity, manual process of doing this.

AI is just the digital, structured, systematized method of doing the same thing.
But we can’t get away from the fact that you’ve totally eliminated the effort axis—or you’ll be able to soon even though you can’t today. It’s a sticky problem that forces us to ask what function copyright is really supposed to be serving.
But even if you argue that copyright is important for protecting the work of artists, it doesn’t solve your problem anyway. Saying that derivative AI work is stealing from you is like saying that you stole my words because you used the same words in a different sentence. Dumb.
This is dumb even if I learned those words FROM you. They’re still not YOUR words. They’re constituent building blocks owned by no one... and everyone.

But saying that “society” or “the government” owns these words is also dumb.
Even if all you did was press a button, that’s still a button that YOU pressed and not someone else. And you’re the one choosing to market and sell the thing you pressed the button to get. And the button probably wasn’t free because TANSTAAFL.
So once again we’re in this weird area where you did take some action to create a unique product and the gripe people have with it really just comes down to a matter of effort and scale.

The problem is that manual production can never compete with high quality AI production.
But now there’s another angle to consider, which is that this is just another technological advancement in tooling to achieve that outcome. It’s a dramatic one and an order of magnitude different from the ones we usually see, but it’s the same thing.
No one gets upset that GIMP is better than MS Paint and makes it faster to create high quality digital art, and no one bats an eyelash at the fact that both are faster than acrylic paint and the easel. Not a lot of logos get painted by hand these days unless they’re on buildings.
And while you can claim that it’s somehow less noble or less tasteful or skillful to use ProCreate than to paint a masterpiece in your studio, this is a matter of opinion and expedience and preference than any kind of moral truth.
And you can’t really get upset about tools for creation getting better—they’re available to you too, in theory. You might LIKE painting on an easel better than drawing in Procreate, but it doesn’t mean you should get an advantage in selling the work you produce.
But until now a pretty substantial amount of effort was still required for production, even with advanced tools. Skill, planning, whatever. This will still be true with AI, but not NEARLY as true. Curation, editing, and recognizing great art will become more important.
And even those will be obsoleted quickly as the meta landscape around this improves and an AI is trained to recognize taste preferences for audiences another AI is an expert at segmenting down to the smallest tail level. This isn’t sci-fi. This is MAYBE 15-20 years away.
So where does this leave us?

I have no freaking clue. But I do know that copyright will become totally irrelevant in an era where you can produce high quality excellent work tailored to individual preference just by wishing for it.

No one will bother stealing work.
Not when you can just generate whatever you want from the AI hive mind super entertainment cluster. For a small monthly fee, of course.

And the question is who should get that fee? It’s a huge question. You can argue from any of the angles I laid out here.
Realistically, it probably should and probably will be captured by society as a whole on some level. And in fact, this is what’s happening with open source tooling around AI. Whether taxed or free or claimed by the government, you have the same end result.
It really seems like without forcibly enslaving all the smart people or escalating a digital battle into actual combat (eventually), no private entity can maintain a hold on this kind of technology for very long. A few decades at most, if that.
I’m just thinking out loud. There’s no thesis to this thread. I don’t know that things WILL go this way but it seems pretty likely to me.

And that is a very weird future. I have no idea how it shakes out practically. The next five decades might be the most interesting to date.
The future is a strange country. The world’s gonna get a whole lot weirder soon.

Sorry this wasn’t a short thread as promised.

/fin
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