[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/only-humans-not-ai...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Imegine the courts were to recognize some algorithm as the legal owner of a copyrighted work. What exactly would that mean?
If someone were to reproduce that work, how would they seek approval from the algorithm? If they don't, how would the algorithm sue them? If it did and won, how would they pay restorations?
Would any copy of the algorithm hold the copyright of that work, or only a particular one? If all copies do, and you infringed their copyright and had to pay damages, how much damages would each copy of the algorithm receive?
The concept of an algorithm holding copyright or a patent or nay other kind of right over something is in fact logically incoherent if you examine it even slightly.
Now, if in the future there would be some form of advanced AGI that does have the ability to understand and use such rights, the situation may change. But nothing that exists today comes anywhere close.
Corporations are a group of people working together for a common goal. “AI”s are made up of zero humans.
It makes sense that a corporation can own something, because that is just a legal proxy for humans owning it. It doesn’t make sense for an algorithm to own anything.
> It doesn’t make sense for an algorithm to own anything.
Current AI might be that. I don't know when AI will end up with a rich inner world of experiences, but I bet it won't be the exact same moment the law recognises it as such.
I'd go even further: even if it somehow becomes possible to prove absolutely that some AI is sentient (which would be a remarkable development in the philosophy of mind), I'm fairly sure people will argue against such a proposition at least a decade after an AI passes such a test.
Natural rights are partially rooted in some religious tangents that I don’t really wish to go down either, but I don’t know of any software other than TempleOS that is claimed to have come from god. For pretty much all AI algorithms, I think people agree they are man made.
Because you ended that with a presumption "no", regardless of if I said "yes" ("ja") or "no" ("nein") you might well take that as an agreement, but "doch" is (when used as a particle) always a disagreement with the main claim: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doch#German
So:
Doch, a perfect copy of a human mind but in software would be a counter example where the human intelligence itself would imply to me that it has personhood (others will argue about p-zombies, and rich-inner-world consciousness is not well enough defined to convince people in general even with this, which is where I was going with my original point).
But it wouldn't matter if the answer was "yes", because I was very careful to write about sentience and inner world experience rather than intelligence with regard to rights.
If you wish to argue that intelligence is necessary for creativity, then existing AI must count as intelligent, but (A ⇒ B) ⇏ (B ⇒ A) so don't mistake that for a claim for the reverse.
If it’s “any of it is human”, how about AI cooperating with a human? Or perhaps connected to a human brain?
But does it have to be a brain? What if it’s, say, a human appendix? It would fulfill the same role it does in humans.
EDIT: Some people apparently don’t realize that to corporations, humans are just another asset, like buildings or software. And they get replaced much more often than buildings and some machines.
Corporations aren’t humans - they use humans. You could argue it’s usually humans who makes decisions - however, 1. Not always and you can’t tell from outside; 2. Even when it’s humans, they are based on data prepared by a machine; and 3. Even law handles consequences of those decisions differently from decisions made by humans for themselves.
The legal definition of a person is very clear. Even the logical definition is actually quite clear: anything that can possibly exercise most of the rights of a human in a meaningful way can be considered a person.
Can a horse own a piece of land in the same sense that a human does? Not really, as a horse simply can't exercise the right to sue someone who would infringe on its property rights even if it were granted one. Sure, a small child or an adult in a coma may be in a similar situation, but the child may eventually grow up and become able to exercise such a right, and the adult may eventually wake up from that coma.
A machine of any kind that actually exists today is far farther from being able to recognize and exercise any human-like rights than the horse is, in fact. So it's even more absurd to assign copyright to a machine than to an animal.
Indeed: “The reason for the term "legal person" is that some legal persons are not people”
(A collective entity is a technical term that does carry the implication of being composed of humans)
Tell that to Blake Lemoine. /s
These are all assets of the corporation; they are not the corporation.
Connecting a human to a machine doesn’t change the rights of the human, and it doesn’t give any rights to the machine.
Figuratively, maybe. Legally, no. This conversation is about specific legal terms, so figurative usages do not apply.
The only way they can be equated is if you make generalizations so broad and metaphorical as to be legally meaningless.
For me the issue with recognizing that AIs can have copyright is the difference in how they are bestowed. IANAL, but you actually have copyright on an expression of something the moment it is expressed, even without any slow legal paperwork, whereas patents only mean something once the patent is officially reviewed granted, no? So the unbounded rate of AI's expressing all plausible content (a thousand monkeys but much smarter) and thus preemptively stopping humans from getting copyright on it, seems especially awful.