>> But suppose the government dropped the hammer and banned any AI. Is it even possible to enforce? It kind of seems like the genie is out of the bottle here.
> We enforce copyright law, even though the actual act of copying is technologically trivially easy these days.
Exactly. Many software engineers have this weird misunderstanding of law that seems to come from misapplying mathematical standards to the legal system. A law isn't a fucking proof, it doesn't have to be 100% airtight, completely preventing all cases of the undesired behavior to work and be valuable.
I'll make up an analogy on how we enforce it. Imagine that you're watching a bunch of unruly kids on a playground and you have a strict 'no violence' set of rules. The problem is all these children are straight out of hell and just love hitting each other as much as possible. You'd be physically worn out trying to cover lessor acts of violence your actual rule is "If there is bloodshed there is punishment"
That is more how enforcement of copyright actually works. You really, really have to screw up pretty big time for it to be enforced.
Now imagine the "Copyright Absurdism Universe". This is a place where any copyright infringement is immediately detectable by magic the moment it occurs. Do you think this universe would have anything even close to the laws we have? I do not believe so at all. Effectively it would cause society to fall apart very quickly since society and civilization are built on the sharing of all kinds of ideas including language and imagery where any form of copyright maximalism would cause people to be afraid to use any new ideas for fear of being fined by the owner of said ideas.
> We enforce copyright law, even though the actual act of copying is technologically trivially easy these days.
Exactly. Many software engineers have this weird misunderstanding of law that seems to come from misapplying mathematical standards to the legal system. A law isn't a fucking proof, it doesn't have to be 100% airtight, completely preventing all cases of the undesired behavior to work and be valuable.