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.
(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.
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.
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.
"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.