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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

This meme is unsubstantiated gatekeeping.

Everything we do as humans is a form of copying. Our languages, our thoughts, our jobs, our hobbies. We stand on the shoulders of all that came before us.

The ability to imagine or evaluate art is easy. The ability to create it takes time. AI removes the tyranny of opportunity cost in learning this talent at the expense of others. Just as your washing machine removed the manual labor of washing your clothes, freeing you up to do more.

Digital cameras did not make photographers go extinct. And they created so much more previously unpredicted societal wealth that impacted us in ways we couldn't have imaged, such as the creation of online dating (selfies), QR code scanners, interactive translation lenses, 3D scanners (NeRFs), and so much more.

AI/ML will probably turn all of us into our own Spielbergs / Scorseses / Miyazakis, and it probably doesn't stop there.

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> AI/ML will probably turn all of us into our own Spielbergs / Scorseses / Miyazakis, and it probably doesn't stop there.

Sure, buddy, just like ChatGPT will turn us into Einsteins, Knuths and Turings (hint: they won’t, you can’t replicate exceptional people with a crutch; exceptional people will be able to utilize it, but not general public)

> Sure, buddy, just like ChatGPT will turn us into Einsteins, Knuths and Turings (hint: they won’t, you can’t replicate exceptional people with a crutch; exceptional people will be able to utilize it, but not general public)

Run-of-the-mill programmers are now building extremely complex solutions thanks to data structures and algorithms invented by the likes of Knuth. Sometimes it helps knowing the internals, most of the time, however people are using them only knowing inputs, outputs, and the name of the API method.

From fact checking myself it is worth noting that stable diffusion will absolutely copy things in ways that would probably infringe a copyright (not a layer and not legal advice), but I found this paper interesting both because some of the examples it gives of clear copying don't look all that copied to me, and because some do and they find overall a relatively high rate of copying. 1.8% https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03860. I believe this is still not peer reviewed.

The counterargument used to be “AI art is transformative, and learning is okay” but now it’s just “human art is copying too” ?

To be clear, these statements are not incompatible. And this has always been my argument.

I'm ready for AI to replace all laborious job functions and give everyone creative superpowers.

It’s the same thing. An interesting thing to consider is that the stable diffusion model was trained on terrabytes if images but the output is a 4GB model. Copying would require access to the originals but clearly the original art is are long gone and any output is new generation from learning.

“Humans are just as dirty” isn’t consistent with the fact that “derivative” uses and “transformative” uses are distinguished.

> clearly the original art is are long gone

Counterexample: https://twitter.com/kortizart/status/1588915427018559490

And how much of the revenue generated by that photograph was ever seen by the subject of it?

It's a particularly pertinent example as the model in that photo was actually forced into taking the shot against her will, and had her life subsequently ruined over it, meanwhile further propelling the photographer to riches.

Should we be arguing against the development of cameras to stop this kind of thing from happening?

Who ever said anything about revenue?

People talking about copyright exclusively talk about revenue.

Copyright isn’t meant to gatekeep people from copying each other just because it’s fun to gatekeep. The entire reasoning we give to continue using that system is based on revenue.

So, the answer to your question is: everyone.

You are trying to casually deny GNU GPL. On HN. WTF?

I invite you to think about whether the GPL would be required for what it tries to achieve, in a system that doesn't have copyright at all.

GPL depends on copyright! It literally depends on parts of copyright frameworks that grant authors to have fun gatekeeping others.

FSF guys had been fighting and defeating "you saying we stole GPL'd code is bogus because free internet stuff can't be stolen" for decades. It just makes no sense that you'd assume the foundation of GPL applies to code but not to images.

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