[comfysocks]

Musicians that create original beats using samples of other artists music often owe royalties.

I think this is a better analogy. If a generative AI model was trained on vague memories of its inspirations, the output would suck. You only get impressive output when you use high quality exact copy training data.

Do you know any artists that can generate an exact copy of “girl with a pearl earring” or any other masterpiece you can name?

[kianlocke]

A sample is using a literal cut-and-paste of a section of another copyrighted work and re-selling it directly -- on the other hand, musicians that wholesale take a particular beat or rhythm section, but remake it using their own instruments, do not in fact owe any royalties at all. Rhythm is notoriously un-copyrightable (only melody).

As for artists that can generate an exact copy -- down to the brushstrokes -- there are in fact a number of them. We call them art forgers - generally, this is for works no longer in copyright, so the issue is the fraudulent claim of them being by another artist, rather than the reproduction of the work.

However, for the purposes of this discussion, I'd like to remind you that we are not talking about exact reproductions -- merely new works in a similar style.

[hn_acker]

> A sample is using a literal cut-and-paste of a section of another copyrighted work and re-selling it directly

"re-selling it directly" is not the usual case. The sample is just the extracted piece, while the practice called sampling is incorporating the piece into a new work [1]:

> In sound and music, sampling is the reuse of a portion (or sample) of a sound recording in another recording.

For example, hip hop is a genre which grew around sampling [1].

Sampling isn't necessarily fair use, but can be [1]. Reselling an extracted piece of a song almost certainly isn't fair use.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)

[kianlocke]

Sorry, I meant using directly in a work that is then resold. Thank you for clarifying, though.