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> For some incomprehensible reasons, people seem to accept "mixing A and B is not a new idea because A and B already exist." Like... why?

In copyright-law (and I think patents?), there is the Threshold of originality. Basically you evaluate how much work and change went into something, to distinguish it from other works. Which IMHO comes down to how much of a and b can you still see in the mix, and how much did mixing them changed them in the end product. If the change is low, then people more likely consider it as not innovative.

Or how Homer Simpson once said: “People are afraid of new things. You should have taken an existing product and put a clock in it or something.”

Copyrights don't protect novelty. Two people can independently create the same thing and both be entitled to copyright. You cannot do that in patent. Only one is an invention in the eyes of the law.

The threshold for originality in copyright is the bare minimum, so it's not a good standard for "invention". Patents have a much higher bar to overcome, and it is hard to put into a simple explanatory phrase.

I think what you are describing in copyright isn't the issue of originality, but determining what is encompassed in a copyrighted work. The court will analyze what the work consists of, and what of it was your expression, as opposed to someone else's. So, it's not novelty exactly but it's close.

> Copyrights don't protect novelty.

Yes, and no. I can't speak for laws in the USA, as I'm from Europe. But Copyright-laws in the EU do have parts which specifically target mixing and mashups of content, and how much new content of your you need to add to make it count as a separate work. These parts were recently updated, because of YouTube, the meme-culture and so on. But it's my understanding that for music and text-quotes, the whole concept is already longer around. So I guess US-Laws do have something like this too?

So of course, this does not handle novelty on a global scale for all of mankind's knowledge and content, but the general Idea and how to handle it is there.

> Two people can independently create the same thing and both be entitled to copyright.

Similar maybe. But for literally the same, I doubt it. People are getting already sued for having too much similarity.

My point is more that, in the way the law works out, what you get to protect is the part of an expression that is unique to you, which can include mashups, etc. My point being that this is perhaps distinct from novelty, as novelty isn't a requirement of copyright, just independent creation.

>Similar maybe. But for literally the same, I doubt it. People are getting already sued for having too much similarity.

Full stop yes. Independent creation of the same thing is not an issue in copyright law in the US. I do not speak about Euro copyright, as I'm merely a US atty. In US copyright law, a necessary element of infringement is access to the allegedly copied work - if access to the work is rebutted, then there is no copying and no infringement. The copyright stands.

Copyright laws are a tool, not a reason by itself. They are aimed to give money to inventors, not to judge innovation. You can argue they do judge in order to accomplish their aim, but that's the byproduct, not the aim. So let's not give the laws more meaning and usage than they deserve.

on similar (I think) line of thought, but further along,

the reason to have property (also a tool, or social-technology to be slightly more precise), i.e. ownership over things is a byproduct of having a marketplace in which we can trade.

In this view, the marketplace (or trade, depending on your outlook) is THE WAY to come together and put all our skills together in order to co-create (con-struct) something much larger.

Alas, capitalism means that only a very few chosen elites (which are, by this point, mostly autonomous corporations) get to decide what we all work together to co-create. We as human individuals are only able to participate in this figurative "marketplace" (understood as a social-technology) as the part of merchandise, specifically as 'commodity'-style labor.

Do you have an alternative to suggest? Under most of human history the chosen elites inherited their positions from an ancestor who won an important war. Capitalism may not be an even playing field but the process that lets Elon Musk build landing Rockets is an order of magnitude more even than the process that let Kuresh build pyramids. Is there a model that might be more even still?

nevermind

Totally agree. The idea that ideas/bits can be owned is a slippery slope with bad policy at the bottom. Maybe it was once necessary as a sort of training wheels for innovation, but it has long since become more of a drag than it's worth.

Ah, that's fair. I formulate a similar observation by saying that digital assets inhabit a post-scarcity economy which doesn't work the same as a resource-based scarcity one, and using the same money for both requires more suspension of disbelief than most of us are capable of.

>> Basically you evaluate how much work and change went into something, to distinguish it from other works.

Copyright exemptions (fair use/fair dealing etc) are a million times more complex than that. There are times when one adds almost nothing yet will still get protection. Take political humor. A standard bit is just to point out something funny. Look at how often political comics (John oliver/stewart etc) just play a clip of some politician. No edits. No commentary. The clip speaks for itself. That is still protected speech. Understanding how the comic adds to the clip cannot be expressed in numbers.

You are confusing the "copying" analysis element of infringement, with the affirmative defense of fair use. They are not related. A necessary element of proving infringement is showing what was copied, which most likely requires the court to construe exactly what is covered under a given copyright.

I mean, if the examples are to be believed, GPT4 seems to be able to explain what's funny about a given image. It's not out of the question that it or some future iteration could reduce that very thing to a discrete set of numeric scores.

If we follow this line of thinking: in the, let's call it, "pre-AI" days all of the ideas that we have of the form "Mixing A and B" are ones that at least one human found to be interesting/valuable (and the ones that become common and get remixed must have been interesting/valuable to many humans). Maybe the "originality" of the idea isn't the thing we care about, per se, but rather that fact that somebody though it was interesting to shine a spotlight on this region of the idea space for the first time.

But now that we have software that can generate massive amounts of "Mixing A and B" ideas automatically... I dunno, seems like we're heading toward a sort of "pollution of the idea atmosphere" where we get a ton of new/remixed ideas dumped into the world that haven't passed through that initial filter of a human vetting them as particularly useful or valuable or interesting in the first place.

> I dunno, seems like we're heading toward a sort of "pollution of the idea atmosphere" where we get a ton of new/remixed ideas dumped into the world that haven't passed through that initial filter of a human vetting them

We already have that. Observe: ahem “It is an industrial capacity, that many people like the Reddit poem person who does the cow thing. And everyone delighted in the nonsense of words that are sense.” Or, perhaps you want something on-topic? “Your ideas about ideas are mere ideas. Ideas that are ideas are ideas, but these ideas are not ideas. lol!” Perhaps an unoriginal, unfiltered synthesis of some good ideas? “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a potato peeler could save you 5 Altairian dollars a day.”

We don't need AI to produce unoriginal, unfiltered internet comments. Certain YouTube comments sections provide a great example (though the problem with YouTube comments isn't as bad as people tend to make out). We humans already have social mechanisms to keep the good ideas and ditch the bad ideas, even when many of the humans aren't bothering to filter their own output.

There's two variations, one stupid one not. The stupid one is "novelty no longer exists and maybe never did". You've covered it. The not stupid one is this question about the closure under creativity in the same sense that numbers are closed under multiplication and addition. Sure you can make infinite numbers, but you can never multiply and add your way to a cat, because a cat isn't a number. Is everything we do rearrangement of basic known parts much like numerics is rearrangement of basic known digits? Its a deep question.

Your "deep question" fails to address gspencley's point: If everything we do is a rearrangement of basic known parts, where and when did we get the basic known parts? From cavemen? From apes? From protozoa? Someone, at some time came up with the basic known parts.

So, was that real creativity, or not? If not, why not? If the parts are really "basic", they didn't come from other, pre-existing parts.

And if it was real creativity, why is it impossible for us to do the same?

If you need examples of creativity, look at the math. Math is full of the novel (at the time of invention) concepts: complex numbers, groups, automorphisms, etc., etc. None of these concepts can be obtained by rearranging the "parts". Sometimes a new concept requires the invention of "parts" that had never existed before, and, in turn, becomes a "part" in the future inventions.

All the advances relying on new concepts and discoveries or inventions in science, math, logic and technology would suggest that the basic known parts are not set. So yes, there's been plenty of genuine novelty. Culture as well as new forms of music, food and entertainment come into existence. New words are always being coined as languages are fluid.

In the context of this thread however, an AI mixing a randomly selected A and B makes it generate an idea that is just as original as a human's.

I do believe AI sometimes generates an idea that is just as original as a human's.

I don't believe originality is that valuable. It's a positive term to me, but just slightly.

I've seen a lot people on HN credit the SV companies' "free food" practice to google. Do they believe free food for your employees is a new idea that someone in google came up with? I don't think so.

> 2. No one else did mixing A and B before. The "Mixing A and B" is a new idea.

With such definition, GPT-4 can create new ideas.

It definitely can. GPT-3 can too. You know the joke about "idea guy"? Who has "idea" but no programming/design skill and no connection to bring funding? New ideas aren't always very valuable.

At least GPT brings funding sometimes.

I'm finding it spectacular for generating ideas. Ask it for "40 ideas for plugins I could build for Datasette" for example. The results are comparable to what I've seen from a meeting room full of humans for an hour, but GPT-4 generated them in less than a minute.

Really? I feel like if you have to ask what plugins to build you’re doing it wrong. You should know what plugins to build by being a user of Datasette and understanding its limitations for your self.

I know Datasette better than anyone else, and I still couldn't come up with 40 useful ideas in less than a minute.

Once you have an AI to also prototype the plugin ideas, such an idea list may become useful. I've always seen that the owners of any product have more product improvement ideas than they could economically implement.

I asked GPT-4 to implement a simple plugin yesterday, and the code was 90% right out of the box.

I’ve always interpreted statements like “there’s no such thing as an original idea” or “everything’s a remix” not literally, but rather as a reminder that new ideas are born from a cultural context and the ideas in it, using those ideas like a language of creative expression.

I often take it a step further and use it as a reminder that new ideas are rarely born from one person but rather the contributions of many, each too small to be noticed as an “original idea”, but when viewed collectively, can be revolutionary.

Isn't the "no such thing as an original idea" point more about there being so many people alive now that one cannot think of anything that somebody else hasn't though of as well?

So many advancements (like the airplane) often get invented simultaneously by different people in completely different areas of the globe without any connection to each other.

"C is not an original idea, because it's just mixing A and B..."

"A fax machine is just a telephone and a waffle iron!" —Abraham Simpson

I think that most people are attached to the idea that humans have some type of "soul", even if they don't call it that. This soul, as the thinking goes, is completely separate from material reality, and allows people to have ideas that come "out of nowhere" and are not inspired by anything in particular. In this way, humans are supposedly different from machines, whose outputs are a mere function of their inputs.

This is the root of the objection to AI. To say that humans are similar would imply that a person's thoughts are a function of their sensory experiences, and that is not a popular view.

Similarly, people like to think that a person's behavior is not a mere function of their experience- that they are capable of "choosing" how to react to their circumstances. They will accept no explanation that appeals to material conditions or biology. A man steals bread not because he is poor and hungry, nor because of some chemical reaction in his brain, but because he "chose" to steal. The part that chooses would his "soul", which cannot be explained in terms of cause-and-effect.

No, this a straw man. The line of reasoning here, first, makes a lot of presuppositions about AI and it is overly reductionist about human intelligence. I see this comment constantly in all HN threads about AI, “humans intelligence is nothing but probabilistic sparks” or whatever just actually means.

You’re going to have a lot of unproductive conversations if this what you believe other people think.

There’s a much richer discussion going on about current-generation AI and its prospects that is grounded in plainly materialist and technical insights, with thoughtful differences of opinion about what current research demonstrates and about what the sophistication of biological/neurological machines may involve in comparison.

You might find that conversation more enriching if you tune into it instead of the one you seem to be focused on.