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> The amount of work it would take just to account for all the copyrights, let alone negotiate and compensate the creators, would be infeasible.

Your argument is the same as Facebook saying “we can’t provide this service without invading your privacy” or another company saying “we can’t make this product without using cancerous materials”.

Tough luck, then. You don’t have the right to shit on and harm everyone else just because you’re a greedy asshole who wants all the money and is unwilling to come up with solutions to problems caused by your business model.

This is bigger than the greed of any group of people. This is a technological sea change that is going to displace and obsolesce certain kinds of work no matter where the money goes. Even if open models win where no single entity or group makes a large pile of money, STILL the follow-on effects from wide access to models trained on all public data will unfold.

People who try to prevent models from training on all available data will simply lose to people who don’t, and eventually the maximally-trained models will proliferate. There’s no stopping it.

Assume a world where models proliferate that are trained on all publicly-accessible data. Whatever those models can do for free, humans will have a hard time charging money for.

That’s the sea change. Whoever happens to make money through that sea change is a sub-plot of the sea change, not the cause of it.

If you want to make money in this new environment, you basically have to produce or do things that models cannot. That’s the sink or swim line.

If most people start drowning then governments will be forced to tax whoever isn’t drowning and implement UBI.

Maybe the machines will just pay for more of leisure time as they were originally designed to do? It may just be as simple as that?

Remember the 4 hour work week ? Maybe we are almost there ?

Let’s face it, most people in a developed country have more free time than they know what to do with, mostly spent in HN and social median ofc :)

Check out the short story Manna by Marshall Brain for some speculative fiction on exactly these subjects.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

>Tough luck, then. You don’t have the right to shit on and harm everyone else just because you’re a greedy asshole who wants all the money

It used to be that property rights extended all the way to the sky. This understanding was updated with the advent of the airplane. Would a world where airlines need to negotiate with every land-owner their planes fly above be better than ours? Would commercial flight even be possible in such a world? Also, who is greediest in this scenario, the airline hoping to make a profit, or the land-owners hoping to make a profit?

Your comment seems unfair to me. We can say the exact same thing for the artist / IP creator:

Tough luck, then. You don’t have the right to shit on and harm everyone else just because you’re a greedy asshole who wants all the money and is unwilling to come up with solutions to problems caused by your business model.

Once the IP is on the internet, you can't complain about a human or a machine learning from it. You made your IP available on the internet. Now, you can't stop humanity benefiting from it.

Talk about victim blaming. That’s not how intellectual property or copyright work. You’re conveniently ignoring all the paywalled and pirated content OpenAI trained on.

https://www.legaldive.com/news/Chabon-OpenAI-class-action-co...

Those authors didn’t “make their IP available on the internet”, did they?

First, “Plaintiffs ACCUSE the generative AI company.” Let’s not assume OpenAI is guilty just yet. Second, assuming OpenAI didn’t access the books illegally, my point still remains. If you write a book, can you really complain about a human (or in my humble opinion, a machine) learning from it?

> So people will still produce artwork.

There's zero doubt that people will still create art. Almost no one will be paid to do it though (relative to our current situation where there are already far more unpaid artists than paid ones). We'll lose an immeasurable amount of amazing new art that "would have been" as a result, and in its place we'll get increasingly bland/derivative AI generated content.

Much of the art humans will create entirely for free in whatever spare time they can manage after their regular "for pay" work will be training data for future AI, but it will be extremely hard for humans to find as it will be drowned out by the endless stream of AI generated art that will also be the bulk of what AI finds and learns from.

AI will just be another tool that artists will use.

However the issue is that it will be much harder to make a career in the digital world from an artistic gift and personal style: one's style will not be unique for long as AI will quickly copy it and so make the original much less valuable.

AI will certainly be a tool that artists use, but non-artists will use it too so very few will ever have the need to pay an artist for their work. The only work artists are likely to get will be cleaning up AI output, and I doubt they'll find that to be very fulfilling or that it pays them well enough to make a living.

When it's harder to make a career in the digital world (where most of the art is), it's more likely that many artists will never get the opportunity to fully develop their artistic gifts and personal style at all.

If artists are lucky then maybe in a few generations with fewer new creative works being created, AI almost entirely training on AI generated art will mean that the output will only get more generic and simplistic over time. Perhaps some people will eventually pay humans again for art that's better quality and different.

The prevalence of these lines of thought make me wonder if we'd see a similar backlash against Star-Trek style food-replicators. "Free food machines are being be used by greedy corporations to put artisanal chefs out of business. We must outlaw the free food machines."

>one's style will not be unique for long as AI will quickly copy it and so make the original much less valuable

Note that the fashion industry doesn't have copyrights, and runway fashions get copied very quickly. Fashion designers still exist in such a world.

There are alternative systems. One would be artists making a living through other ways such as live performances, meet and greet, book signings, etc.)

We could also do patronage. Thats how musicians used to be funded. Even today we have grants from public/private institutions.

We could also drift back into "owning the physical media" We see this somewhat with the resurgence of records.

NFTs would have been another way, but at least initially, it failed to become generally accepted into the popular conscious.

I'll gladly put money on music that a human has poured blood, sweat, tears and emotion into. Streaming has already killed profits from album sales so live gigs is where the money is at and I don't see how AI could replace that.

Lol, you really want content creators to aid AI in replacing them without any compensation? Would you also willingly train devs to do your job after you've been laid off, for free?

What nonsense. Just because doing the right thing is hard, or inconvenient doesn't mean you get to just ignore it. The only way I'd be ok with this is if literally the entire human population were equal shareholders. I suspect you wouldn't be ok with that little bit of communism.

There is no way on Earth that people playing by the existing rules of copyright law will be able to compete going forward.

You can bluster and scream and shout "Nonsense" all you want, but that's how it's going to be. Copyright is finished. When good models are illegal or unaffordable, only outlaws -- meaning hostile state-level actors with no allegiance to copyright law -- will have good models.

We might as well start thinking about how the new order is going to unfold, and how it can be shaped to improve all of our lives in the long run.

I think there’s no stopping this train. Whoever doesn’t train on all available data will simply not produce the models that people actually use, because there will be people out there who do train models on all available data. And as I said in another comment, after some number of decades all of the content that has been used to train current models will be in the public domain anyway. So it will only be a few generations before this whole discussion is moot and the models are out there that can do everything today’s models can, unencumbered by any copyright issues. Digital content creation has been made mostly obsolete by generative AI, except for where consumers actively seek out human-made content because that’s their taste, or if there’s something humans can produce that models cannot. It’s just a matter of time before this all unfolds. So yes, anyone publishing digital media on the internet is contributing to the eventual collapse of people earning money to produce content that models can produce. It’s done. Even if copyright delays it by some decades, eventually all of today’s medial will be public domain and THEN it will be done. There are 0 odds of any other outcome.

To your last point, I think the best case scenario is open source/weight models win so nobody owns them.