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Comment by NoRelToEmber | Hacker News Reader

> Personally, I find the prospect of doing 1 day of work, and potentially having an impact on hundreds of various artistic works thrilling.

At issue is compensation. The studios don't want to share the income they gain from your "impact". They want all the benefits of this new technology to accrue to themselves. Reminds me of self-driving cars coming with EULAs that forbid commercial/taxi use of self-driving.

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I also have no problem owning a self driving Tesla with the provision that fully autonomous commercial use shares revenue.

Just like studios paying gfx artists to incorporate my visage, the Tesla engineers are doing all the work. I literally do nothing in both scenarios. Why would I be entitled to compensation?

I imagine that the reason car companies don’t want taxi or Uber to use self driving mode is because of liability reasons, not because they want a share of taxi companies profits. Taxi/uber drivers still have to pay for fuel/maintenance costs, and currently most self driving cars still require a driver in the seat (except for companies like Waymo and Cruise, that operate their own fleet).

So even if taxi companies were allowed to use self-driving mode in a car like a Tesla, they’d still need to pay a person to be in the drivers seat.

Isn't that what we all do? Code I write today is used indefinitely and I get paid once plus some token equity.

No, that analogy is flawed. Programming now is more like the studio recording a scene then being able to edit it however they want. Imagine that you sat down and wrote some code to guide a wheelchair around bumps for one day, then your employer said “thanks, we’re done with you” and re-used your code to guide an autonomous killer drone. You might argue that’s technically possible now, but most developers would go out of their way to avoid it.

I don't think any of these movies are killing people so I think you've stretched the analogy way further

Fair point - my hasty response was over the top. I was thinking of someone whose likeness had been scanned being 'made to appear' as something like an SS soldier in a WW2 movie. Thinking about it a bit more, it's not just that your code can be re-used in ways you haven't anticipated, but that you'll never get to code again - in that one day, all the code you could potentially write had been expressed, and there was no need to ever hire you personally again to code anything.

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