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Comment by rafaelmn | Hacker News Reader

Copyright is artificial scarcity rationalized by arguing that producing novel intellectual work is valuable, but requires substantial effort that can't be recouped, so we have to incentivize it somehow.

LLMs and AI are changing that proposition substantially - human effort involved in producing copyrightable content is getting reduced constantly to the point that if we abolish copyright entirely we'll still have more content than we could ever hope for.

AI/robotics eliminating scarcity of physical goods sounds very far fetched but in the intellectual space it looks very very plausible in the near future - so it could be time to abolish IP laws soon, especially if AI manages to advance enough in R&D and research space.

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If there is no legal guarantee that human creativity can pay off we are starving art and humanity from its inception. If ordinary people cannot participate in the act of creation, you get exactly what hollywood has become.

Sorry, but this reads like a mouthpiece exactly from those companies that benefit the most from having no copyright and I doubt your have thought this actually through.

Lack of way to capture value from intellectual labor is considered a market failure that leads to suboptimal market results for consumers, but with AI that argument becomes very weak.

Sorry but the point isn't to create artificial scarcity just so intellectual labor is well off, that's a negative side for the consumer that was considered necessary tradeoff. Market economy should be about providing the most value to the consumer.

Disclaimer - I was never a fan of IP laws despite them working in my favor, with AI I can see them finally being abolished.

    We could imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.

I don't think the point is to just create as much content as possible, either. The term "content" alone implies lack of quality.

IMHO, any LLM output is, and systemically forever will be, inferior to human creative output, if not entirely worthless. We can scale and industrialise the production of slop, sure, but who wants that and to what end? We're not getting the next cultural movement or artistic masterpiece from these systems no matter how often we pull the lever of the regurgitation blender machine. Because human intent is the whole point, and without it, there is no reason to make any of this.

I agree that it should be about creating the most value to the consumer. As a consumer, the value I get out of LLM writing or art is almost always exactly zero, and it makes it that much more difficult for me to find the things I would see value in.

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