Copyright and AI
|
JC pontificates about technology
An occasional series.
|
in which the JC puts on his Tim hat and begins to speculate about the future. So we know that copyright and intellectual property are essentially bankrupt ideas that haven't worked for 40 or 50 years now, and I used essentially as a form of Monopoly protection by rent seeking agents. Off the soap box. And at the same time llms and chat GPT and art generators have been threatening well-meaning artists by apparently plagiarizing their work, while there programmers insist nothing of the kind is happening .
Imagine for a moment that nothing of the kind is happening, and that the llm is indeed generating genuinely new artwork which cannot be attributed to copyright. This presents copyright with a different problem: now harvesting real human generated art becomes progressively more expensive than just having a AI generate it for free. I have found this already, much of the JC’s artwork is computer generated because it's simply easier than commissioning artists comma even though the output is undoubtedly unsatisfactory.
Imagine if AI had the undoubtedly positive effect on the human community of inviting a wholesale re-examination of the foundations of intellectual property law, 2 acknowledge and recognize that a great deal more of the competitors creative act exists between artwork and consumer, and indeed that any creator in generating an artwork is itself borrowing, reusing, mashing up, and rearticulating things that have already gone before. In other words, artists are really being somewhat hypocritical to complain about AI.