[yellowapple]

> Your soul will not remain intact while you hoover up artists’ work to train theft-engines that poison the water of communities in need.

This sentence nose-dove the article's credibility.

Intellectual property and the enforcement thereof is in and of itself a Torment Nexus. The belief that thoughts and ideas and words and images and sounds can be "stolen", and that such "theft" is somehow a bad thing (instead of the sort of free exchange of ideas that has benefited humanity for its entire recorded history) is itself mutually exclusive with having an intact soul.

Yes, artists deserve to be able to earn a living making art (absent a universal basic income that renders the notion of "earning a living" moot). Yes, it's understandable that they choose to do so by wielding IP law, because that's the most straightforward option they have in a capitalist system that actively rewards Torment-Nexus-enforced rentseeking. No, that doesn't make them any less complicit in the perpetuation of that Torment Nexus. These are the same laws that enable Disney to sue the pants off of parents who dare to decorate their dead children's coffins after said children's favorite fictional characters. These are the same laws that rob other creatives of their creative autonomy lest their works "infringe" on the "rights" of richer creatives who can afford better lawyers. These are the same laws that normalized shipping rootkits with creative works for the sake of "digital 'rights' management". These are the same laws that actively hinder the preservation of creative works for historical posterity, causing those works to be at risk of being lost forever. Intellectual property has done vastly more harm than good, and AI throwing a wrench in the ability to meaningfully enforce it is one of the exceedingly few good outcomes of AI proliferation.

Your soul will not remain intact while you parrot MPAA/RIAA "yOu WoUlDn'T dOwNlOaD a CaR" talking points in defense of collecting royalties until 70 years after you die.

[mindslight]

I share your view of imaginary property. But pushing in the right direction is much more important than being 100% correct about everything.

[yellowapple]

Demonizing the one good outcome of AI is the opposite of pushing in the right direction, though. It's like the author missed his own point, self-awarewolf style.

[mindslight]

I think you're assuming a lot to call it a "good outcome". I foresee hefty regulatory capture and compensation deals made with the big copyright businesses, but no real increase in freedoms for individuals.

[yellowapple]

That would be the outcome of the Torment Nexus succeeding at kneecapping the first thing in decades with any hope of destroying it, not the outcome of the thing in question succeeding at destroying the Torment Nexus.

[mindslight]

I don't really understand what you mean here, because I don't really know what you specifically mean by Torment Nexus. It wasn't bad for a rhetorical technique of pointing out the incentive-attractor(s) that we're already suffering (Mammon, the orphan grinder, etc), but the term doesn't really work for analyzing technicals unless you spell it out.

In general, now that the pump has been fully primed for capital to flow into developing "AI", I do not see how copyright law is going to make much of a dent in that trend. Nor do I see how "AI" companies are going to make a dent in copyright law for anyone but themselves. I foresee large "AI" companies being essentially unbound on training over small-owner copyrighted works, upstart "AI" companies needing to pay into a hefty protection racket, and individuals still bound by imaginary property laws whether directly (old fashioned piracy) or when using common genAI (sorry Dave, I can't do that).

I just ran into a situation where ChatGPT refused to quote me the relevant bit of the electrical code for my state (supposedly binding law), because those laws were created by wholesale importing the "National Electrical Code" which is copyrighted. At best, the situation is an open legal question. And yet de facto there is still a restriction that prevents me from using the tool to engage with the law in good faith.

[yellowapple]

> I don't really understand what you mean here, because I don't really know what you specifically mean by Torment Nexus.

I thought I made that pretty clear when I wrote in my original comment that "[i]ntellectual property and the enforcement thereof is in and of itself a Torment Nexus."

> In general, now that the pump has been fully primed for capital to flow into developing "AI", I do not see how copyright law is going to make much of a dent in that trend. Nor do I see how "AI" companies are going to make a dent in copyright law for anyone but themselves.

"AI" exists outside of the various corporations hosting LLMs on The Cloud™. The corporate-hosted LLMs get undue emphasis largely as yet another result of the Torment Nexus that is intellectual property.