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Comment by mapontosevenths | Hacker News Reader

I gloss over it because it's an argument that makes no sense to me.

Ai is progress. Further, the works it creates are fully transformative. It isn't just spitting out Harry Potter verbatim, it's making new things from it.

To me, this argument is like staying that if you read Winnie The Pooh as a child then Milne owns your artistic output for life, because one of your many influences might have been his work. It just seems obvious at face value.

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The frequency with which AI boosters leap to "clearly once you've read a book the author owns everything that comes out of your brain" still shocks me a little bit. It's obviously not the same as somebody torrenting books2 or libgen or whatever and training on it for profit.

I see no argument here. Just a note that it seems to be obvious to you. It must not be as obvious to me, or millions of others or we wouldn't be on the opposite side of it.

>Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists.

Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences?

Whatever it started out as (and I have my doubts it was ever a tool to help artists), it's now primarily a tool corporations use to milk creativity for profit and squash it where it might interfere with that profit.

> Is impoverishing them supposed to encourage progress in the arts and sciences?

No, but that needs new laws. Not an abuse of the old ones justified under the thinnest of pretenses.

I don't think that folks stop to consider what bending copyright law into these weird shapes to meet their ends will do to other aspects of copyright.

For example, sampling in music. How is that different from AI generated music? If anything AI uses LESS of any individual song. You can't just say "no derivative works." That would fully halt progress on many fronts.

If a song was made purely of samples with no original input I'd argue it's in the same category. Maybe AI uses less of any individual song, but does AI make something actually original and transformative or is it just bits and pieces of all the things it learnt on (in simplified terms)? I think that's where the discussion lies.

Entirely new works are often created entirely from samples, and can be amazing. See "Frontier Psychiatrist" by The Avalanches for one example done entirely by humans. There are many others.

Amazing or not, that is not the discussion. LLM output can look amazing as well but that's not what I'm arguing about. Also with LLM's we'll reach a point when everything is made out of samples (metaphorically speaking), where do we fit original content then, or who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately.

> Also with LLM's we'll reach a point when everything is made out of samples

We reached that point with humans long ago. There's nothing new under the sun. Only remixes of dead peoples greatest hits. The pentatonic scale, for example, was not invented by the people who use it.

Science and art would have to start over from scratch if you expect things to all be genuinely new from first principles.

> who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately

People who enjoy making it.

people who enjoy making it won't be able to afford to do it, alternatively only rich people will have means to do so. So I guess thats progress in some eyes

> people who enjoy making it won't be able to afford to do it

The demand for paintings did not disappear when photography was invented. Though many Luddites claimed it would. There were even those who wanted cameras outlawed to protect the artists livelihoods. Do you think we should have listened to those people?

Is this situation different from that one?

Sampling in music is long settled in the US - it is a copyright violation if not licensed, with the rare exception being cases where the sample is fair use:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)#Legal_and_eth...

How is it progress if it stops people from sharing. It just reduces everything to the lowest common denominator. Or how is it progress if the data centers just eat up all the components skyrocketing the prices for regular people.

You might be confusing patents and copyright.

Patents exist so that the secrets behind inventions are revealed in exchange for a limited time protection, promoting collaboration and progress.

Quoting the US constitution:

"The Congress shall have Power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

It's about promoting science and art, not "paying authors". Paying authors is of course the mechanism by which art is promoted.

That clause is the basis for both copyright and patents.

Note that not all Arts are "useful" and not all Arts are "Writings".

Most art is not intended to be an open-ended product to be further collaborated upon and extended in order to drive progress.

Protections are purely so that the creators can get paid in some shape. There is still art if they don't get paid.

Copyright somewhat stifles that activity in art which consists of imitation; imitate too closely and you invite accusations of infringement.

A work of art being copyrighted is not what motivates and encourages activity revolving around copying that work's style. That's what it would mean for the work to promote Art as such: the work gets studied and it style becomes part of the artistic vocabulary. This will happen copyright or not; the only difference is the conditions for compensation.

> Protections are purely so that the creators can get paid in some shape.

That's not what the founding fathers said, and it's not what they wanted.

Madison thought that the two things were really the same saying: "The utility of this power will scarcely be questioned. The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors. The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals. The States cannot separately make effectual provision for either of the cases..." — Federalist No. 43 (1788)

Whereas Jefferson, who not only helped draft the consititution, but was the first patent examiner, was deeply suspicious of them and wanted a restriction on length directly spelled out at length in the constitution itself.

"I like it [the Constitution], as far as it goes; but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additions would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding — years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose." — Letter to James Madison (August 1789)

They all agreed that the purpose was progress for everyone, not one mans enrichment. They disagreed a bit about how best to accomplish that.

That it’s illegal for employees to use copyrighted work that they dont have permission to use to build a product seems much more obvious at face value than comparing an llm to a human artist.

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