[soultrees]

What would you say the basis of all knowledge you know is? You are a collection of everything you have consumed and the stuff you create is all influenced by that.

Personally this whole llm debate about copyright is quite funny. As someone who very much has skin in the game(my art is trained on midjourney.), and who runs in a circle of artists, it’s interesting to see people’s ego’s come at play here. The ones who are excited about these as tools are the ones who are openly inspired and want to inspire however the ones who claim copyright infringement seem to come off as insecure, almost like they are afraid that this idea of theirs will be the last great idea they have. There’s already a separation happening in the art world of people who are exploding in creative output vs the people who are so defensive and cling to the old way of doing things.

If I had my way, I’d see copyright laws abolished completely. A complete free for all in innovation. And people who claim that without parents and copyright then there’s no incentive to make money seriously underestimate humans and their ego to continually innovate.

[saurik]

> What would you say the basis of all knowledge you know is? You are a collection of everything you have consumed and the stuff you create is all influenced by that.

FWIW, humans certainly can infringe other peoples' copyrights and can do so even if they aren't actively intending to do so. There is some boundary across which you are no longer just learning something and you are now copying, and it isn't clear at all that these generative AI techniques are actively considering the latter the way a human is required to.

But, sure: if you are against the idea of copyright entirely then it is hard to consider the idea inconsistent, though I would think a world without copyright would be a particularly hard one for an artist to make money at all...

[JVillella]

>What would you say the basis of all knowledge you know is? You are a collection of everything you have consumed and the stuff you create is all influenced by that.

Surely you're not suggesting that there's no such thing as "original work". The production of which may have very high capital and labour costs - which if not protected from theft - would remove the incentives of producing original work.

>As someone who very much has skin in the game(my art is trained on midjourney)

I don't know your specific situation, but there's obviously different scales of importance here. What if your art was your sole source of income, and people were reproducing it under their own name? or if you had a product where you poured millions into developing some novel IP/methods, and some employee brought it with them when they went to work at your competitors?

[WalterBright]

Over here at the D Language Foundation, we encourage people to download it for free and do whatever they want to with it. It's all Boost licensed.

> some employee brought it with them when they went to work at your competitors?

Other programming languages have copied lots of D features. We at the DLF don't mind at all. Though often they copy them and kinda miss the mark.

(Yes, we sometimes copy features from other languages, too, and try to improve on them.)

[zzzzzzzza]

some things like drug discovery could probably be done with a bounty system rather than intellectual property, and could probably get much better results for a fraction of the cost for maintaining the intellectual property component of the court system

[lewhoo]

The ones who are excited about these as tools are the ones who are openly inspired and want to inspire however the ones who claim copyright infringement seem to come off as insecure

Yeah yeah, your side are the good guys and the other side is a bit dodgy.

[vkou]

> What would you say the basis of all knowledge you know is?

When someone teaches me, they don't own all my future creative output.

When someone teaches an AI, they do.

That's the principal difference between human learning and machine learning.

[bhattid]

I think what you suggested is an unpopular opinion, but I also wholeheartedly agree with it. :)

I'm certainly no expert on copyright law, but my understanding is that its purpose is to protect the financial interests of certain creators from the progress of technology (e.g. copy paste). I've heard arguments that removing copyright would lead to less creativity or reduced quantity or quality of work, but I'm personally a bit skeptical (probably for the same reasons as you - I think people have a natural desire to create). Even in terms of financials, I would speculate that an employment/patronage model would become more widespread.

I think there's something to be said about the benefits of having freely available knowledge, music, and art for common consumption. When I was a child in high school (or well, always lol), my parents couldn't afford a lot of material I needed or wanted for studying (especially for standardized testing, SAT and AP tests) and most of the books in my local library either did not exist or were outdated. But when I discovered that much of this information could be found online, it really changed my world and made success in life feel attainable to me. I consider myself quite wealthy now, but I don't think I would have been able to escape poverty if all this information was paywalled from me. Maybe others would argue the writers are not being compensated for their efforts, but if there are other people in the world in the same position as past me who could positively benefit from it, I think that's a better world to live in, personally.

Incidentally, the release of StableDiffusion has actually inspired me to draw a little. Not sure why, but I find it inspiring being able to iterate on a prompt and produce something of quality that I can try to replicate on my own. Even if I fail, I still have something to appreciate that maps fairly well to the concept in my head.

My hope is that these technologies might lead to a change in our financial system (I think UBI would be a good idea), but I suppose we'll see where everything ends up. I think there's likely going to be a lot of pain in the short-term (especially since there are those who don't want to adapt), but hopefully everyone will positively benefit in the long-term.

[JVillella]

I really appreciate your personal experiences and how the availability of knowledge online changed your life. It did the same for me as well.