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Comment by Aerroon | Hacker News Reader

>AI companies can ask for permission if they want to train their models on other people's works. It's not that hard

Yes, and then people say "no" or "pay me". End result of this is that the only ones with good AI models are megacorporations that will DRM the heck out of it.

Years later those same artists will complain that they now have to pay $1000 a year to Disney/MS/Adobe to create art. Because these megacorporations can afford to pay for it. They're the ones that will benefit the most from this, because it creates an insurmountable moat for them.

Copyright exists to encourage the creation of more art and to progress science. AI is clearly a helpful step in that direction. Humans learn from others' works. Should we make that illegal too?

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> Copyright exists to encourage the creation of more art and to progress science. AI is clearly a helpful step in that direction. Humans learn from others' works. Should we make that illegal too?

I find it astonishing that people continue to make this argument. A machine is owned by someone, a human is not. Why should the law treat machines the same way as a human? Sounds like some corporate flim-flam to me.

>To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

The purpose of copyright is not to protect the authors, it is to promote the progress of science and art.

The current situation for AI image generation is pretty much the only way these technologies will be available to everyone. Most other paths will simply lead to billion dollar corporations acting as gatekeepers to this technology. Megacorps can afford to hire artists to generate specific art for their AI models, everyone else cannot.

My point is that this quasi-legal argument about how “humans learn so why can’t machines learn” is a non sequitur. This is a case where quantity has a quality all its own. Copyright law was not invented with anything like this situation in mind.

You end up with billion dollar corporations gatekeeping this technology either way (who else has the capital to best train the models?). This isn’t about the little guy.

>Why should the law treat machines the same way as a human? Sounds like some corporate flim-flam to me.

It shouldn't, that's why arguments that the algorithm is learning, so it's doing the same thing that is legal for humans to do is completely fallacious, on top of it just being anthropomorphism.

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