Your issue is with capitalism apparently. Like it or not, creators rely on copyright to make a living and have an incentive to create more, and quality, art.
Starting a legal precedent that copyrights spreads like fungus and encompasses any thought related to the copyrighted work seems like a horrible idea, one that can only lead to a dystopian future.
I think that is a good argument, but conflates is and ought, and I have two counters:
copyright owners can dictate how their work is used (with some exceptions), and if that use hurts the copyright owner, the owner should have the right to forbid it.
the intent of copyright is to reward and encourage creators and creativity. If a script kiddie can just train a model and duplicate the hard-won aesthetic work of Molly Crabapple or Ralph Steadman or anyone at all, and either dilute the value of it or actually profit from it, what is the incentive for creators to create new work at all?
Consider a poet who publishes poetry in some unique meter, or has some other unique stylistic structure for which they are well known... should they be allowed to sell copies of their poems that can be used for reading only, but prevents usage of those stylistic devices by other authors?
I'm going to assume that we agree the answer is "no, the author should not be able to prevent those uses" at least for human consumers of their works. This is how art has always developed... even though that use "hurts the copyright owner" by diluting the market for works with that style, the owner does NOT have the right to forbid it.
Now, let's say that same poet drew a lot of inspiration from a bunch of out-of-copyright poets. Let's also say that I train an AI model on the poet's inspirations, but NOT on the poet's work directly. Then I ask the AI to write a poem in the style of the poet's inspirations, and to include the unique stylistic device for which that poet is famous. In your world, is this OK?
I don't think this is a fair analogy. Unfortunately, analogy breaks down because the technology is unprecedented. So, to answer directly, no the poet cannot copyright the unique meter, but, no, machine learning is not that.
If you need an analogy, think copy machine, not human learning. An LLM can only regurgitate that which it has seen before. Absent the poet, the other poets can still make other poetry, but the LLM literally cannot make poetry that it has not seen before. If it produces a poem with that unique meter then it definitely copied that poet, and was not "inspired by" the poetry. If you wrote poetry inspired by EE Cummings your process for doing that would be very different from an LLM's, which would programmatically use his material.
Full disclosure: I think I probably disagree with you on some points you've made in this thread, but I'm not going for any gotchas right now, I am just trying to map the contours of what you think is OK and not OK. We're all sort of flying blind on this stuff, so getting a sense of what others are thinking is really important in my mind. Appreciate the engagement.
Like if I read their books and then write better ones in their style, undermining their profits?
again, for the people in the back.
> from reading your books or seeing your art if they obtain a legal copy.
You're arguing against something I didn't say
We should still obviously do it. More of a thing that people want is usually good.
???
They are not creating anything unique or otherwise. It’s not remotely comparable.
The whole point of the phrase was to describe a hypothetical situation with no side effects to avoid sideways arguments about "but actually here's some bad things that would happen if you did that unrelated to the central argument".
So let me try again: in my view, you shouldn't think of policies or laws impacting real people by ever placing yourself outside of the reality in an ideal case, because the hard bit is not conjuring ideals but finding a way of making them happen.
It's always a lot messier where the rubber meets the road. People have already died and suffered because ideals (specifically around asset ownership) that weren't quite thought through, but caught on. Take communism as an example.
Part of my point is that such "implementation details" are not as unrelated to the central argument as they seem. This is very different from the software world where it might be ok to assume that in 2 years we'll have the computations be 10x as fast and work out a solution backwards from there.