Copyright and AI
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The JC pontificates about technology
An occasional series.
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In which the JC puts on his tin hat to speculate about the future. Again. So we know that copyright and intellectual property have been used for 50 years as monopolistic protection by rent seeking agents. Off the soap box.
And at the same time, LLMs, chat GPT and art generators have been threatening well-meaning artists by ostensibly plagiarising their work, while their AI programmers insist nothing of the kind is happening .
Imagine for a moment that nothing of the kind is happening, and that LLMs indeed generate genuinely new artwork which cannot be attributed to any existing copyright holder. This presents the law of copyright with a different problem: as licensing human art becomes progressively more expensive compared with generating AI artwork 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, to 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.