[hyperion2010]

> This is why I introduced the concept at the beginning of royalties for AI work. Ultimately AI is not an alien brain generating texts or images from its own imagination. Neural networks and large language learning models input real people’s intellectual property and output that intellectual property when prompted by someone using the program. The novelness of the output is merely how the IP is reformatted to fit the parameters of the user’s prompts.

The crux of the argument is this paragraph. But swap out AI in that paragraph for "writers who have read the classical western canon" and suddenly you realize that no one has original ideas, and that the idea that somehow humans are uniquely capable of being the primary causes of their own thoughts and owe transitive credit (and royalties!) to the great authors of all time, or their estates, is madness.

The threat is the even further enclosure of the commons and the expropriation of culture by corporate interests who actively seek to destroy common culture by preventing the very people whose participation in a now privatized "culture" enables corporate profits, from ever earning a cent because they do not "own" the "IP" to the characters that they love and that are only common because they are a shared element of a common culture. It is absurd. If media corporations had to compensate whenever someone mentioned a trade marked character because it counted as advertising then let them keep their "culture" private. Until then, they are the beneficiaries of billions of dollars of stolen advertising and stolen culture.

[lapcat]

> The crux of the argument is this paragraph. But swap out AI in that paragraph for "writers who have read the classical western canon" and suddenly you realize that no one has original ideas, and that the idea that somehow humans are uniquely capable of being the primary causes of their own thoughts and owe transitive credit (and royalties!) to the great authors of all time, or their estates, is madness.

I disagree. As a cinephile and bibliophile, I'm often astounded by the creativity of writers. I don't know where they get their inspiration. Sadly, I don't possess such creative inspiration myself, despite having read "the classical western canon". Much of the great work is actually autobiographical, taken from the writer's own life rather than derivative from previous work.

[ben_w]

I would argue that autobiographical content is no less derivative than reading a book or watching a film, then retelling it. Any creativity is in the difference, and only the difference.

[jack_pp]

Yeah, I've listened to tens of thousands of hours of music, especially Hip-Hop. Couldn't rhyme to save my life

[SenAnder]

To expound on your point, corporations will be able to use AI - giant conglomerates such as Disney, that own enough media to train AI models on only works they own copyright on (and own enough senators to make sure those copyrights last), will happily use AI.

But you, peasant, can only train it on century+ old works. Because "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", nothing post-WWII may become public domain, or artists will starve and culture wither.

[harshreality]

For a longer form version of this argument, Cybergem's "AI vs Blood Mouse": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pIVVpoz5zk

[YeGoblynQueenne]

If nobody has original ideas then where did the "classical western canon" come from? And what about all those people in the Far East, who never read Homer? Where did the Romance of the Three Kingdoms come from?

I don't understand how we got to this point, where a machine trained to reproduce the results of human creativity is taken as evidence that there exists no such thing as human creativity. What are we training LLMs with, if not the results of human creativity?

I think maybe that's all the result of growing up in an era were there is so much repetitive, trope-filled entertainment that people assume nobody could ever create an original work of art that wasn't just a stitching together of other peoples' ideas. But that doesn't make sense for the same reason I give above: those ideas must have been original at some point.