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Comment by greysphere | Hacker News Reader

Are you copying one or more of those works? If so, yes. If you aren't, then no. How do you know? Well as an artist, after thousands of hours of copying, and thousands of hours of drawing from imagination, you know which activity you are doing. As an untrained person, you might not know, but the quality/value is so low no one cares.

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But drawing from imagination is just copying from an abstraction existing in your brain. And that abstraction comes from inputs from the outside that you saw in the past, where would it come from if not that?

In the Obama example it comes from copyrighted inputs. Without the photos in the magazines and newspapers I would not have idea how Obama looks. Any draw I do, it's going to be derivative of those copyrighted photos and, maybe, other inputs more generics that I saw in the past (that could be copyrighted too).

How is that different from what that software is doing? It's not, it's just that it's done in an industrial scale.

This is just the same problem an artisan had when factories started to appear.

You are using the words 'input' 'output' and 'abstraction' interchangeably between the computer version and the brain version. We know next to nothing what those words mean regarding the brain. Declaring an equivalence seems like a substantial overreach. What we do do is use the terms from the latest technology to describe the brain[0]. What's particularly egregious about this iteration is we are also using human terms to describe the latest technology, and then using those terms 'inspired by', 'creative', 'intelligence', 'learning' as if the algorithms have anything to do with what humans are doing. And then even more, we go on to use them as smokescreen for piracy "the computer 'learned', therefore it's somehow not copying the source material".

Publishers license text to print in books. Music producers license samples to use in songs. Artists license photos and textures to use in illustrations and scenes. _License the source material used in training sets_. _Then_ go out and industrialize art, everyone wins!

[0] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/metaphors.pdf

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