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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

> how an ML system scanning and training on a copyrighted work is different from a highly skilled artist doing the same?

You just answered it? One is a ML system and one is a human?

I'm really, really baffled why people keep using this argument. Like you guys know machines are not humans, right? ...right?

Humans are special cases in laws. Always have been and always will be (until AGI). A pedestrian is treated differently in laws than a driver is. The fact that a pair of legs and a car both move you from point A to point B doesn't make them same. Selling human livers on your local market is very different from selling cow livers, even biologically they are all organic tissues.

Let me say it again: humans are special cases. AI learning copyrighted materials might be illegal or legal, but it has little to do with "what if a human being does the same".

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Isn't copyright about the final product, not how it was arrived at?

If I independently come up with a song called "Let it Be" that has the same lyrics as the Beatles song and publish it without the permission of the copyright holders, I will have violated their copyright.

It doesn't matter if I heard the song before or not. It doesn't matter if I did it myself or used a computer to do it. What matters is the final product and my publishing of a song close enough to the one that was copyrighted.

AI image generators are just tools, like Photoshop is a tool. Nobody cares if you used a paint brush or Photoshop to create something that looks like a copyrighted image, why should AI image generators be any different?

If the final image is similar enough to a copyrighted work and I publish that image without permission of the copyright holder, then that's a copyright violation.

If the final image is different enough, then it's not.

That an AI was used and how the AI was trained are completely separate issues.

Patents do work this way, but copyright doesn't cover independent invention. However, in practice, if you reproduce a popular work exactly, it's so incredibly unlikely to be actual independent invention, that the court will assume it's not.

> Always have been and always will be (until AGI)

Probably not even then, at least not initially. While some people conflate AGI with personhood, consciousness, qualia, etc. we've got at least 22 different[0] ideas of what consciousness is and no idea how to even determine whether or not a mind has qualia — and even if we did, I see no specific reason to require any of them, as a P-zombie[1] AGI doesn't seem to me like a contradiction in terms.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-022-00587-4

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

In law there is such a thing as legal person as opposed to natural person. When it comes to commercial law, its provisions tends to relate to legal persons.

legal personhood (such as corporate personhood) are tools/frameworks which facilitate certain economic actions, such as the creation of charters for specific initiatives.

Like any useful force amplifier, legal personhood has effectively been co-opted to benefit those entities which stand to gain from it (e.g., corporations, large-money political donors, etc).

Thus, it probably won't surprise anyone when AIs are granted legal personhood, to bypass the detrimenal effects they will inevitably have on natural persons.

That said, it is likely a good thing to keep meatspace in some kind of privileged legal category, lest the rights of legal persons outweight those of natural persons (which seems to be the inevitable conclusion, and goal, of all this).

I agree with you somewhat, in that human rights should be protected and law is just a tool, that I feel should be used to better humanity. There is a philosophical thought behind the whole idea of copyright, I suspect it'd be best to use that as a starting point rather as I'm sure it would weigh the pros and cons of your point against other factors. It fundamentally is designed to strike a balance between a creator and wider society.

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