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by anonymousab 1010 days ago
People can do a lot of things that we don't legally allow machines or automation to do.
2 comments

True of some things, but not of Fair Use. Automatically generating thumbnails is generally Fair Use, for example.
Like what? The only things I can think of relate to quality/safety (eg. drivers or lawyers).
Participate politically, seek employment, and of course the examples you gave.

When pubic safety and goodwill comes in to focus, that's where the role of automation is scrutinized and minimized more heavily. Copyright itself is an invention and area of balancing individual rights and greater public good.

Machines are not human and they are not sentiment and sapient at a level where we can view them differently. Perhaps they will change one day, but as it is today these systems are not entitled to do the same things humans get to do. They are tools performing a task, so the laws apply to them as they apply to, well, machines; copying and reproducing whole code blocks or novel chapters without attribution or licenses is something we allow a human to do in their head and not what we allow a machine to do in a prompt, regardless of the non-human mechanisms in between.

Human or not doesn't seem relevant in any jurisdiction which emphasizes copyright as a means to the end of "promoting useful art", as the US Constitution does, rather than an end in itself.

The moral calculus probably changes if machines are deemed capable of producing "useful art", as granting artists temporary monopoly ceases to become the only mechanism of spurring that art.