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Comment by mapontosevenths | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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...

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?

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