Bohemians at the Gate?

The analogy is reduced to the point of irrelevancy.

OpenAI isn't trying to produce art. They are trying to replace human creation with artificial creation, but an artificial creation whose entire input was the human creation.

Kawano was not trying to replace Mondrian. And Mondrian was dead.

Personally I'm happy to restrict copyright expiry and AI input to the work of dead people. Right now copyright is too long and AI is happy to ignore entirely. Let's allow AI and humans to both reproduce the work of dead people but leave the living to their benefits of their creation so long as they are alive.

What does Mondrian's estate owe to Oliver Byrne's estate, since he basically stole Byrne's color scheme and style from his version of Euclid's Elements? (And what does Byrne's estate owe to Euclid's estate?)

IP law is a purely practical matter: what most incentivizes intellectual production? If a culture errs too far toward restriction, that country ultimately falls behind. The US itself jumpstarted its industry by mass IP theft and industrial espionage to steal the hard work of British inventors and entrepreneurs; its entire publishing industry got its start by copying British works wholesale in what was then the world's most flagrant IP violation. As an angry sputtering Dickens wrote:

> You take the uncompleted books of living authors, fresh from their hands, wet from the press, cut, hack and carve them... all this without permission, and against his will; and then, to crown the whole proceeding, publish in some mean pamphlet, an unmeaning farrago of garbled extracts from his work, to which your name as author, with the honourable distinction annexed, of having perpetrated a hundred other outrages of the same description.

Americans mostly shrugged, or attacked him as a mercenary scoundrel, before proceeding to build the world's largest publishing industry.

The US needs to make laws governing how copyright applies to generative AI; when it does, those laws should grant expansive fair use rights. Otherwise, the US will be left behind.

From a copyright perspective the only question that matters is this: Do we treat AI models like (Xerox) copiers or do we treat them like artists?

If we treat it like a copier it's the end user that's responsible when they tell it to produce something that infringes on someone else's copyrighted work. No different than if someone walked up to a machine and copied an entire book.

Furthermore, if the end user never even distributes the result of a prompt the question is moot anyway: Copyright only matters when something gets distributed. No distribution == No violation of copyright.

If we treat AI like an artist it is the owner/creator of the AI model that's responsible when it produces something that violates another's copyright. Since it is literally impossible to maintain a database of all copyrighted works that exist (in order to check if something violates copyright or not) this option is untenable. It's not possible to implement unless we go back to requiring all copyrights be registered (and provide that database to anyone that asks—thus, distributing all those copyrighted works which would defeat the purpose).

I very strongly believe that the courts will ultimately settle on treating AI like a copier. It's a tool/machine and should be treated as such by copyright law.

"The Baroness Kidron amendment would require companies to provide a log of all of the URLs their models were trained on, and keep this up-to-date every month."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39xj284e14o

MPs rejected that amendment and sent the Bill back to the Lords.

"Kidron's amendment will not provide certainty of anything except for certainty of more uncertainty, of continuous regulations stacked one upon another in a pile of instruments...

"Jumping the gun on one issue will hamstring us in reaching the best outcome on all the others and especially because this is a global issue and we cannot ringfence the UK away from the rest of the world."

However, Kidron said her amendment "does not challenge the primacy of the Commons" and pushed ahead.

The result was a decisive defeat for the Government, with 287 votes in favour of Kidron's amendment and 118 against - a majority of 169 - and the Bill will now be sent back to the Commons.

Something I keep thinking about is that nobody would think twice if some young musician gave an interview that said "{older artist} was a huge inspiration. their songs were fundamental in shaping how i think about the artform", nobody would be up in arms claiming that they have stolen from the elder artist. it's art inspiring other artists the way it always has.

so why does it feel different when LLM ingests some music to "fundamentally shape how it 'thinks' of the artform"?

i can create loads of speculation about what that difference is, but to be honest it all feels pretty post-hoc and hand-wavy.

I don't think existing copywright law matters with respect to AI. AI generated art is unprecedented and I'd argue there is a moral imperative to distribute the wealth generated by AI to those whose creative work enabled the technology even if we don't have a legal (or technical) framework for doing this in place yet.

Copyright exists to formulate art[1] as capital.

Let's take a step back and recognize this for what it is - juridification - the replacement of social relations with legally enforced economic relations. It assumes, incorrectly, that everything made by people is subject to exchange. It's not, and for the most part, that's not how artists themselves conceive of art.

The artist community mostly operates on attribution. That is, influences are appropriately stated and attribution is the social currency. Unattributed works violate social norms. The problem is when these social relations are codified as economic relations. It's weird, like when Milton Friedman argued that children owe their parents for raising them[3].

As much as some people believe that this would imply the creation of rights, it misses the point. Freedom to choose does not include freedom from having to choose. The infinite variety of rich human relations are flattened into one dimension - economic. That erases what's most important to the human experience.

1. Insomuch as art is literary, musical, or artistic work

2. https://www.sv.uio.no/arena/english/research/publications/ar...

3. https://periferiaactiva.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/201...

I'm not ripping off your song / photo / artwork. No, I'm democratizing it. You should thank me !

Here I thought it would be about denizens of Bohemia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemia

there is enough capital circulating now among certain groups such that there is no practical driver to change anything about the current economics.. "let them eat cake" basically? Appearing to look cultured while arguing for the effective economic demise of the artisan, at scale, is the hot take today here