[freedomben]

> Because artists generally own thier material (with exceptions at the very high end)

This has not been generally true IME. It follows the same pattern as code quite often.

When you pay an artist for their work, many times you also acquire copyright for it. For example if you hire someone to build you a company logo, or art for your website, etc the paying company owns it, not the artist.

In-house/employee artists are much more common than indies, and they also don't own their own output unless there's a very special deal in place.

[sandworm101]

That is a rarified high end, commissioned artists hired for a paticular task. The vast majority of artists do art without tasking and sell copies, a situation where no copyright moves. I have a Bateman print on my wall. I own the print, not the image. Bateman has not licensed anything to anyone, just selling a physical copy. So scraping his work into AI land is more damaging to him than to a coder who has already signed away most copy/use rights via a FOSS license.

[freedomben]

> The vast majority of artists do art without tasking and sell copies, a situation where no copyright moves.

I suspect we may have different definitions of what constitutes an "artist". I include digital art in my definition, and your statement above definitely isn't true for that. Are you just talking about painters/sketchers/etc who are doing it by hand?

If so, limiting the definition to that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, especially given that AI isn't replacing those gigs. If somebody already creates analog art, I don't see AI as being that much of a change for them

[sandworm101]

Artist is everyone who creates copyrighted works. You, me, everyone with a camera. Everyone with a guitar who records. Digital art or paintbrushes, lines of code or lines in the next harry potter novel, it is legally all the same. The artist/creator gets total copyright, then either licenses those rights away or sells copies.

I even have rights over that pervious paragraph. It aint worth much but if someone wanted to monitize it i would have rights i could assert.

[freedomben]

Heh, nice, your definition is even more broad than mine! Ok going by your definition (which I think is quite reasonable), I think we're close to agreement. Appreciate the discussion