[Devasta]

The difference is that humans have a finite work output. 50 shades of grey starts out as Twilight fanfic, but was released as a novel years after Twilight was. Twilight isn't harmed by the existence of 50 Shades.

AI on the other hand can produce books all day every day, hundreds of them nonstop. The minute your book is released it can be fed into a model and have 1000 similar books out within days. It won't matter if yours is better, it'll be drowning in a sea of duplicates.

[Terretta]

Monk scribe, meet Gutenberg. Same argument.

Artificial scarcity in the face of a new efficiency has by-and-large never worked in the long run.

[danShumway]

> meet Gutenberg

We literally invented an entirely new property right out of thin air just because of the printing press; a human-made right that radically changed almost the entirety of the commercial creative industry and tech industry from that point onward, and radically changed what people are allowed to do today with content that they own, even outside of automated settings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

Do you really want to compare AI to the printing press? For better or worse, the law responded pretty hard to Gutenberg.

[Terretta]

Did copyright work?

Did it promote the betterment of knowledge in any way?

Did it kill Aaron Schwartz?

[danShumway]

Is any of that relevant? My point is that copyright was arguably the most radical legal change we ever made around creative markets; a change with wide-reaching implications for people's rights both to automate copying and around non-automated copying and derivative work. And that change was prompted pretty much entirely just by the automation of a human task that was previously widely accepted to be a natural right.

"It's just more efficient" is not a good argument for deregulation, historically it has often been an argument in the opposite direction.

And I am copyright-skeptical myself. But if your argument for avoiding AI regulation is reliant on convincing people to support copyright abolition, you are not going to convince many people to agree with you. You're basically inviting the space to be regulated; no lawmaker is going to think "this is just like copyright" is an argument against AI regulation. And most ordinary people (even in tech) are not going to agree with you, because most people like that copyright exists. Most people don't look at copyright and think, "this was a mistake."

Looking at the history of the printing press should teach us that the last time somebody made the argument, "we're just doing what humans do, but faster" around creative industries, the law responded, "great point, so we'd better ban humans from doing it too." So just understand the implications of the comparisons you're making; understand that invoking the history of copyright is not a slam-dunk dismissal of artists' concerns.

[pwinnski]

Yes.

Yes.

No.

(Yes, it protected independent creators from having their work directly monetized by others, like Disney did.)

(Yes, by providing protections for creators to profit from their own works, it motivated some number of people to write, compose, and create who might otherwise not have done so.)

(No, the government did, using copyright as a pretext.)

Note that points one and two do do not suggest that copyright is useful in its current form, rather than its history 14/28-year form.

[Terretta]

There's no evidence that lack of copyright stops creation. We had poetry, music, and painting before we even had money. Creativity will out.

There's meaningful evidence that copyright slows knowledge sharing and evolution.

Profitable for a single creator, a problem for mankind.

[danShumway]

But unless you have a plan to convince the average person on the street, and the president, and a fillibuster-proof majority of Congress, and a number of international US allies that copyright was a mistake, comparing AI-training on copyrighted material to the printing press is an invitation to create regulation, not an argument against that regulation.

[pwinnski]

I agree that copyright as it exists today is ridiculous, but a complete lack of copyright would destroy a large number of industries that currently exist, and for little benefit.

I'm all for pulling things back to the terms originally in place in the US, for example, despite the changes that would bring to society. But the answers to the questions asked still seemed pretty clear.

[gray_charger]

That's a false equivalency. One is a comparison of methods to mass produce the same text. AI produces very similar but unique works. One enables an author to reach a wider audience, the other kills authors by drowning their works in a sea of similar low quality knock offs.

[Devasta]

Those aren't even slightly the same and you know it.

[Terretta]

On the contrary, in this analogy, the warehouse scale offices full of low income content mill authors are exactly the monasteries of yore.