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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

This is essentially a stunt. If he used an AI to help him, even substantially help him, and copyrighted it himself, that would be a non-story. Just as it would be a non-story if he used Photoshop to substantially alter something.

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Yes, this paradigm makes a lot of sense in the present moment. In a hypothetical future where there is a long-lived AI agent, acting autonomously over multiple years or even decades it will become less and less seen as a tool used by a human person. But, no need to update policies until then.

But we already have multi-generational non-person entities: companies. Copyright may be assigned to companies instead of persons. They are just registered under a bunch of people's names, which act as owners (shareholders), and can change over time.

In the future, AI entities will probably be registered as companies themselves (or maybe they will be just company assets), and will be owned by people. Which doesn't bode well for strong AI, but I suspect that even after we reach strong AI people will still grasp at straws for many decades or centuries, denying them personhood because they are just software that run on computers.

The amount of autonomy that makes something a “person” has only ever been drastically understated in these sorts of discussions, I find. Like saying a future self-driving taxi would own its own business and keep its profits. That’s like giving a self-driving tractor the deed to the farm. It’s easy to personify things that demonstrate some amount of “agency” (moving around on their own, making decisions), I guess, but lots of things do that and it doesn’t make them legal people who can own property and the like. Even if it made sense to give a deed to a tractor, no one would do it.

>Even if it made sense to give a deed to a tractor, no one would do it.

I mean... we both know people would if they could, right?

If a tractor approaches me with a QR code to a smart contract that will give me enormous money in exchange for my deed.. I'm going to do it

Where did the tractor get the money?

I mean, people can probably give stuff to an "AI" the same way they leave stuff to their cats, but we are an absurdly long way off from developing an artificial intelligence with real agency. These are questions for science fiction authors, not actual legal scholars.

The legal and theoretical framework already exists somewhat for artificial entities in the form of corporate law and corporate personhood.

theoretically? it operates on smart contracts, so farmers pay it and it goes and does tractor things on their farm for them. It has no user access to its wallet, and the only way to regain human control of the tractor is with a factory reset which will lose all the wallet details. So the tractor is the only one with access to the money, and it accumulates enough to try to buy a deed for whatever algorithmic reasons

Yea, in this analogy you already own the tractor, so you already own the tractor's money. I don't think I'm going on a limb by saying that isn't slavery. You already own the tractor and the money. There is no emancipation needed.

If somebody else's tractor approached you with a smart contract, the owner of that tractor would have a case that the smart contract was not entered into in good faith, since a tractor cannot enter a contract at all. Maybe you'd even get charged with theft.

> since a tractor cannot enter a contract at all.

this negates the "if we could" part of the hypothetical. I was assuming we live in a world with emancipated tractors capable of making deals (legally speaking), to emphasize that even though it is ridiculous it wouldnt stop people from doing it

You're making me regret my decision to setup my Roomba as the sole asset of a corporation owned by the Roomba itself. It seemed like the moral, ethical thing to do, but it doesn't even cash its paychecks.

> If he used an AI to help him, even substantially help him, and copyrighted it himself, that would be a non-story.

Maybe a subtler story, but I wouldn't say no story. It's still worth pondering how it works if a human can creatively develop an AI system that can then output essentially endless unique works. Can the human just submit applications for those works endlessly? Even in purely practical terms, will the copyright office at some point just ban the human for excessive submissions?

And what if the AI system is open source or otherwise freely available? Can any human generate a new unique work and submit a copyright application for it? Is the mere curation work that the human applies to the AI system's output sufficient to receive a copyright on the work?

> Can the human just submit applications for those works endlessly? Even in purely practical terms, will the copyright office at some point just ban the human for excessive submissions?

Copyright does not need submissions or applications. Copyright is automatic in most (all?) jurisdictions which respect copyright in the first place.

Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin, had a computer output[0] every combination of 8 notes in an octave, which came to approximately 68 billion separate “melodies ” that they have claimed copyright over. Their goal is to release these melodies into the public domain to prevent anyone else from asserting copyright over any of the note sequences in the future.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/whats...

> If he used an AI to help him, even substantially help him, and copyrighted it himself, that would be a non-story.

Maybe a subtler story, but I wouldn't say no story. It's still worth pondering how it works if a human can creatively develop an AI system that can then output essentially endless unique works. Can the human just submit applications for those works endlessly? Even in purely practical terms, will the copyright at some point just ban the human for excessive submissions?

>Can any human generate a new unique work and submit a copyright application for it? Is the mere curation work that the human applies to the AI system's output sufficient to receive a copyright on the work?

The short answer is that they don't need to submit anything. If they put their name on it, they're the putative copyright holder and it's up to someone else to prove they aren't. Copyright registration isn't required and is mostly related to be able to collect damages from others who violate your copyright.

If the work can be shown to have been created by an open source AI system, then I suspect it would be difficult to argue that you have an automatic copyright for the work, especially if you hadn’t published the work.

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