[PuddleCheese]

The brain-computer metaphor is not a very good one, it's a pretty baseless appeal. Additionally, it's an argument that anthropomorphizes something which has no moral, legal, or ethical discretion.

You do not actively train your brain in remotely similar methods, and you, as an individual, are accountable to social pressures. An issue these companies are trying to avoid with ethically questionable scraping/training methods and research loop holes.

Additionally, many artists aren't purely learning from others to perfectly emulate them, and it's quickly spotted if they are, generally. Lessons learned do not implicitly mean you perfectly emulate that lesson. At each stage of learning, you bias things through your own filter.

Overall, the idea that these two things are comparable feels grotesque and reductionist, and feel quite similar to the "Well I wasn't going to buy it anyway" arguments we've been throwing around for decades to try to justify piracy of other materials.

At the end of the day, an argument that "style can't be copyrighted" is ignoring a lot of aspects of it's definition, including the means, and can be extrapolated into an argument that nothing proprietary should be allowed to exist...

[akiselev]

> Overall, the idea that these two things are comparable feels grotesque and reductionist

I agree with you there but the alternative - that they’re not comparable - I find equally grotesque and full of convenient suppositions rooted in romanticism of “the artist”. We’re in uncharted territory with AI finally lapping at the heels of creative professionals and any analogy is going to fall apart.

This feels like something that we should leave to the courts on a case by case basis until there’s enough precedent for a legal test. The question at the end of the day should be about harm and whether an AI algorithm was used as run-around of a specific person’s copyright

[PuddleCheese]

Good points.

I was actually just sitting in a AI Town Hall hosted by the Concept Art Association which had 2 US Copyright Lawyers who work at the USCO present, and their along similar lines, currently.

Basically, like you specified, legal precedent needs to be built up on a case by case basis, and harm can pretty readily be demonstrated, at least anecdotally, especially as copies are made during training of copyrighted work.

Unfortunately, historically, artists do not generally enjoy the same legal representation or resources that unionized industries with deeper pockets enjoy. It's probably one of the reasons Stability.Ai are being so considerate with their musical variant.

It would have been great if artists were asked before any of this. I could see this going in such a different direction if people were merely asked...