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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

the tech would not exist if not for the talented people you are screwing

Do you think so? I can see the AI being trained with crowdsourced input like "does picture A look more like a Mondrian than picture B".

You're still screwing Mondrian in this case and the training system would not exist without Mondrian.

It's a bad example anyway since Mondriaan has been dead since 1944 and all copyright on his works have expired.

hehehe

speaking of, IMO there would be a lot less hullabaloo around OpenAI being derived from unlicensed works if we reverted copyright to 14 years like the constitution says (well, copyright act of 1790)

Everyone could ingest whatever they want up through 2010 and if they want it to know what the New York Times said after that they can pay for it. The midjourney ceo basically said they couldnt be bothered to reach out to individual artists cuz there's too dang many of them, and for that I can sympathize - too much work remains off limits

Take a minute to extend your argument, and it will fall apart: SNL is "screwing" Trump/Biden because their jokes wouldn't exist without Trump/Biden. Movie critics are "screwing" actors, because the review wouldn't exist without the movie.

that's a fair counter but there are laws about this, and your examples are parody and commentary, neither of which effect the market value of the original

the "screwing" is in the form of getting paid for reselling the work of others (depriving the others of the ability to sell their own work - less downloading a movie for free and more like selling bootlegs in front of the record store), not merely being, like, chronologically dependent.

I agree that my examples are about parody and commentary, and I apologize that my intent wasn't clear. I was trying to convey that a derivative work made by studying the original (Mondrian / Biden / Trump speech) should be OK. Like Admiral Cloudberg or Mentour Pilot can take an air-crash investigation and make it more compelling than a Mayday documentary, or, indeed, the FAA report itself. They use the same base material, but sculpt it into something perhaps more compelling. The fact that an AI does this instead of a human seems irrelevant.

SNL jokes are not in the same category. They're not "a speech like Trump's" which would bring nothing new, but jokes based on those. The whole post from Nick Cave is about a generated "song in the style of Nick Cave" rather than something novel that takes inspiration from his songs.

Mine workers extract iron ore.

Iron ore is made into iron which is made into machines which shovel iron ore.

"Tell it like it is

Till there's no misunderstanding

When you strip it right back

Man feed machine

Machine feed man" to quote a (human) poet

an interesting analogy, thanks, I'll trade you some lines I heard from Johnny Cash:

Well John Henry hammered in the mountain, he'd give a grunt and he'd give groan with every swing, the women folks for miles around, heard him and come down, to watch him make the cold steel ring, Lord what a swinger, just listen to that cold steel ring

But the bad boss come up laughing at John Henry, said you full of vinegar now, but you bout through, were gonna get a steam drill to do your share of drivin, then what's all them muscles gonna do, huh John Henry, gonna take a little bit of vinegar out of you

John Henry said I feed four little brothers, and my baby sister's walking on her knees, did the Lord say that machines ought to take the place of living, and what's a subsitute for bread and beans, I ain't seen it, do engines get rewarded for their steam?

Classic. When I worked in industrial automation, I use to refer to the moment when testing said automation would fail, as the "john henry test".

i liked the part where the machine breaks down while the man pushes past his breaking point

but ofc the machine is repairable, the late john henry less so.

And if we had banned these digging machines would be be talking to each other on the internet now?

Somehow work survived.

How are they being screwed?

They are being outcompeted by a megacorp selling bootleg derivatives of their work

Not being screwed looks like royalties for content that the machine derives its value from

> They are being outcompeted by a megacorp selling bootleg derivatives of their work

and driving the value of their hard work to the ground.

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