[ben_w]

> but Western culture has lost the vocabulary to express their true sentiment. They are grasping for words but can't reach for "soul" and other religious terms because that would sound ridiculous in a secular modern world

Ironic to implicitly accuse Stross of this; as I recall, he's one of the voices describing The Singularity as Christian Eschatology/Book of Revelation/the rapture for atheist nerds.

> Would you want the machine to write literature if, hypothetically it could write indistinguishably from any great writer? I guess not.

One of his own paragraphs explains his non-financial perspective and reason:

  I do not want or need a large language model to write my fiction for me. I write fiction compulsively—before I was published I wrote for many years as a hobbyist—so why on earth would I pay someone else to take my fun away?

I may not have quite the level of obsessive desire to write as he has, but I have some, and it is different from the desire to simply consume someone (or some*thing*) else's work.

Without criticism, he is also clearly upset about the economic impact this will have on him (he says specifically he is "one of the parties to the settlement in the class action lawsuit against Anthropic AI for pirating ebooks to train their LLMs" and "train an LLM that is intended to compete for revenue with the authors of the works they stole"). Writing is not a high-earning job (with the exception of a few superstars who may as well be lottery winners), and he has written in support of very long copyright durations that can be inherited.

> People will rather talk about fake water consumption problems than touch the topic of the human soul or spirit.

For a living, he writes about Cthulhu and their ilk doing mind control; I want to say I don't think this would put him off, but if it did he'd hardly be the only professional author who can write a fictional story about something without being able to apply such ideas to rhetoric. (He'll hate being compared to Rowling here, but consider how Rowling hates trans people while her fiction has a variety of shape-shifting spells).

[bonoboTP]

You need better arguments than "you don't like to use it yourself and prefer writing yourself" or some metaphysical voodoo-like theory (analogous to tribes that refuse to be captured on a photo) whereby feeding your words to a training algorithm somehow corrupts your pure Platonic words or whatnot. Your utterances are not yours to grab on to. Copyright is about expression and derivatives. You could never copyright your style, or else any music band that copies the general style of another band could have been sued and then the development of music would also have gone quite differently. No, ideas, styles, claims, knowledge are by default part of the commons. The narrow carveouts are for incentivizing more creative work and are targeted and specific, time limited. You can't generally, by default, restrict what others can do with ideas that you've put out. Patents are a narrow exception. And copyright for non-transformative derivative works or copies. And trademarks to protect consumers from mis-identifying the creator of something.

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> clearly upset about the economic impact this will have on him

So readers will read AI generated books because they are better than his writing? People can't invest ten bucks or however much into reading a good book? How about piracy? It exists. I bet I could download all his books in less than 5 minutes. If someone insists on not paying for that book, they can easily get it.

> he has written in support of very long copyright durations that can be inherited

This whole copyright and intellectual "property" idea is extremely new in human history. More people should know this fact. This has not been how people thought about culture before the ~1800s, or, well before the printing press. Copyright is a narrow exception to the general rule that people are free to listen to others and use the ideas and spread the ideas. There are exceptions like trade secrets and various dangerous information about nuclear topics and whatnot, but generally preventing others from talking about what they heard is tyrannical. If anything, copyright should be reduced to something like the creation of the work + 20 years. Not lifetime +X. That's plenty enough to be the sole distributor and to block others from building on top of it. After that it's time to let people use culture as it's always been. Changing, mixing, remixing, retelling, combining, etc.

The whole thing is often wrongly framed, with verbs like "consume", like "consuming content", which is just Orwellian language to describe having your eyes or ears open and remembering what you saw and heard. It doesn't consume a pdf to look at the words and read them. It doesn't consume a film to look at it being projected on a canvas. It doesn't consume a painting to step close and look.