> You can make private works if you want to keep control of them, but at some point the public deserves to share and rework the things that have been pushed into the public consciousness.
There's already a licensing framework for artists doing this - should they wish to. It's called Creative Commons, and allows a pretty fine distinction of rights from public domain to free for personal use not commercial, and everything in between.
https://creativecommons.org/
I agree our shared culture in some sense ultimately owns the productions of the culture. But that's wildly different to (and in some senses the opposite of) letting private companies enclose, privatise and sell those products back to us. As for example Disney has done over and over again, taking myths transcribed by the Brothers Grimm, or classic novels now in the public domain, 'reinterpreting' them and viciously enforcing copyright on these new interpretations.
The entire point of copyright law is to allow the Bach's of this world to profit from their work - without having to die in poverty and obscurity, as so many artists and musicians have historically, even while others have profited from their work at scale.
> Humans have always learnt by studying what's out there already.
Finally - as other commentators have noted, there's really no similarity at all between a human at human pace studying and integrating understanding of a piece or genre of art, and an AI training to replicate that work at scale as perfectly as possible. A much better comparator would be the Chinese factory 'villages' that reproduce paintings at scale for the commercial market, without creativity or 'art' being a part of the process. But even that is a poor analogy, since individual humans mediate the process. A really good analogy would be a giant food corporation like Nestle somehow scanning the product of a restaurant and then offering that chefs unique dishes that had taken years to invent for nearly free - using the same name and benefiting from the association.
What if the AI is open source and run by individual creators? That changes the slant of the argument a lot. I worry that excessive regulation will mostly come down on individual creators using AI tools.
I'm not sure what you mean? The image and text models currently becoming popular are being trained on work that is not owned or created by those creating the models. The consensus amongst the artists whose work is being used to train them (without their permission or compensation) is very high that this is a bad thing. Financial impacts are already being felt by artists across industries. There's a huge level of denial of the impact of this on professional artists, already today, here on hacker news. 'Open source' is a separate issue to training on other peoples work, replicating their style and stealing their livelihood.
There's already a licensing framework for artists doing this - should they wish to. It's called Creative Commons, and allows a pretty fine distinction of rights from public domain to free for personal use not commercial, and everything in between. https://creativecommons.org/
I agree our shared culture in some sense ultimately owns the productions of the culture. But that's wildly different to (and in some senses the opposite of) letting private companies enclose, privatise and sell those products back to us. As for example Disney has done over and over again, taking myths transcribed by the Brothers Grimm, or classic novels now in the public domain, 'reinterpreting' them and viciously enforcing copyright on these new interpretations.
The entire point of copyright law is to allow the Bach's of this world to profit from their work - without having to die in poverty and obscurity, as so many artists and musicians have historically, even while others have profited from their work at scale.
> Humans have always learnt by studying what's out there already.
Finally - as other commentators have noted, there's really no similarity at all between a human at human pace studying and integrating understanding of a piece or genre of art, and an AI training to replicate that work at scale as perfectly as possible. A much better comparator would be the Chinese factory 'villages' that reproduce paintings at scale for the commercial market, without creativity or 'art' being a part of the process. But even that is a poor analogy, since individual humans mediate the process. A really good analogy would be a giant food corporation like Nestle somehow scanning the product of a restaurant and then offering that chefs unique dishes that had taken years to invent for nearly free - using the same name and benefiting from the association.