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copyright is an antiquated solution to a non-existent problem. it needs to be abolished. if you want to get paid for your work find someone who will pay you to work.

I like the GPL as much as the next person but I like public domain even more.

For my two cents, though this is bit off topic: AI doesn't create art, it creates media, which is why corpos love it so much. Art, as I'm defining it now, is "media created with the purpose to communicate a potentially ineffable idea to others". Current AI has no personhood, and in particular has no intentionality, so it's fundamentally incapable of creating art in the same way a hand-painted painting is inherently different from a factory-painted painting. It's not so much that the factory painting is inherently of lower quality or lesser value, but there's a kind of "non-fungible" quality to "genuine" art which isn't a simple reproduction.

Artists in a capitalist society make their living off of producing media on behalf of corporations, who only care about the media. As humans creating media, it's basically automatically art. What I see as the real problem people are grappling with is that people's right to survive is directly tied to their economic utility. If basic amenities were universal and work was something you did for extra compensation (as a simple alternative example), no one would care that AI can now produce "art" (ie media) any more than Chess stopped being a sport when Deep Blue was built because art would be something they created out of passion and compensation not tied to survival. In an ideal world, artistic pursuits would be subsidized somehow so even an artist who can't find a buyer can be compensated for their contribution to Culture.

But I recognize we don't live in an ideal world, and "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism". I'm not really sure what solutions we end up with (because there will be more than one), but I think broadening copyright law is the worst possible timeline. Copyright in large part doesn't protect artists, but rather large corporations who own the fruits of other people's labor who can afford to sue for their copyright. I see copyright, patent, and to some extent trademarks as legally-sanctioned monopolies over information which fundamentally halts cultural progress and have had profoundly harmful effects on our society as-is. It made sense when it was created, but became a liability with the advent of the internet.

As an example of how corpos would abuse extended copyright: Disney sues stable diffusion models with any trace of copyrighted material into oblivion, then creates their own much more powerful model using the hundred years of art they have exclusive rights to in their vaults. Artists are now out of work because Disney doesn't need them anymore, and they're the only ones legally allowed to use this incredibly powerful technology. Any attempt to make a competing model is shut down because someone claims there's copyrighted material in their training corpus - it doesn't even matter if there is, the threat of lawsuit can shut down the project before it starts.

But at the end of the day the hidden agenda is clear: someone wants to benifit from somebody else’s work without paying them

Yes, our whole civilization would be so much richer overall if everything could be shared and everyone could benefit from the creative and intellectual work of everyone else. Artificial scarcity and copyright is an awful kludge to make this kind of work sort-of-compatible with our awful economic system, and comes at the expense of everyone.

It’s just more proof in the pudding that the capitalist system doesn’t work and will always screw the labourer in some way. It’s quite possible that only the most famous of artists will be making money directly off their work in the future, similarly to musicians.

If it doesn't work then why try to maintain the status-quo? The future you seem to be worried about will not be stopped by more restrictive rules on training data, because the big companies outright own enough media to meet that requirement anyway. And then no one else can, and their monopoly over these fantastically powerful tools that no one can compete with is much stronger. Creative workers demanding AI to be reigned in by copyright seems incredibly naive to me.

It's just more proof in the pudding that the capitalist system doesn't work

I think that's the key part.

You seem to like making art. If you had all your living needs covered, without the need to sell any of your art... would you stop making it?

I think the AI is not the problem, the lack or sidestepping copyrights is not the problem, the mimicking a style that took decades to perfect, is also not the problem.

The real problem, is that AI increases several-fold the underlying problems of the belief in a predatory social system.

But if it helps you sleep at night, think about this: the AIs are not out here just for the artists, they're out here for all human thinking. In short time, bankers and CEOs will be begging along artists, burger flippers, and car mechanics. If there's something the LLMs have proven, is that there is no task an AI can not replicate... and the perverse twist of capitalism, is that there will be someone willing to use them for everything to cut costs, leaving essentially everyone without a job.

1. AI is trained on years, even centuries of work made by generations of people.

2. AI then threatens to replace hundreds of thousands of jobs, to the benefit of huge corporations who could afford to deploy AI.

3. AI could not entirely replace human input at the current stage, but it definitely replaces entry level jobs. Leaving little room to grow for new graduates.

4. Since AI will not get tired and will not complain, major corporations really like them (See Hollywood executives).

5. We must ACT NOW. (Like the writers guild in the US.)

This is speaking from a writer's perspective, your mileage may vary. I used to ask my younger colleague to help with first drafts. Now it may be faster to just use ChatGPT. So how could they grow to become an editor?

Copyright only exists so rich people can own even more things through money alone, without having to do any of the work themselves.

piracy, which can even be ethical

Nah it flat out is always ethical. Nintendo and steam is proof that everyone benefits from piracy. Yes, even the companies.

"But they're stealing my intelectu-" 1) Nobody's stealing shit, it's still there and 2) If your business model involves depriving people who want your product of your product, that's very much a you problem. Don't screw everyone else over to chase dollars that were never there.

"But then the people who made it aren't getting pa-" Newsflash, the Hollywood strike is proof that you aren't fucking paying them anyway.

"You're just defending your shitty behavior because you download stuff for free" Literally never pirated a thing in my life, and probably never will. If I want something I buy it. If I can't buy it, I lose interest and move on to something else.

Ah, people being scared of new technology in their field is a funny thing to watch in real time

If AI generated art is a close derivative of another work, then copyright already applies.

But when it comes to vague abstractions over multiple works that isn't like any one of them, copyright is probably not the right fix for what is fundamentally a more general problem. Copyright has never covered that sort of thing, so you would be asking for an unprecedented expansion to copyright, and that would have immense negative consequences that would do more harm than good.

There are two ways I could see in which copyright could be extended (both of which are a bad idea, as I'd explain).

Option 1 would be to take a 'colour of bits' approach (borrowing the terminology from https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23). The analogy of 'bits' having a colour and not just being a 0 or 1 has been used to explain how to be conservative about ensuring something couldn't possibly be a copyright violation - if a bit that is coloured with copyright is used to compute another bit in any way (even through combination with another untainted bit), then that bit is itself coloured with copyright. The colour of bits is not currently how copyright law works, but it is a heuristic that is overly conservative right now of how to avoid copyright violation. Theoretically the laws around copyright and computing could change to make the colour of bits approach the law. This approach, taken strictly, would mean that virtually all the commercial LLMs and Stable Diffusion models are coloured with the copyrights of all inputs that went into them, and any output from the models would be similarly coloured (and hence in practice be impossible to use legally).

There are two major problems with this: firstly, AI models are essentially a rudimentary simulation of human thinking (neural networks are in fact inspired by animal neurons). Applying the same rule to humans would mean that if you've ever read a copyrighted book, everything you ever say, write, draw or otherwise create after that is copyright to the author of that book. Applying a different rule to computers than to humans would mean essentially ruling out ever automating many things that humans can do - it seems like an anti-tech agenda. Limiting technology solely for the benefit some people now seems short sighted. Remember, once people made their livelihoods in the industry of cutting ice from the arctic and distributing it on ships for people to keep their food cold. Their made their livelihoods lighting gas lamps around cities at dawn and extinguishing them at dusk. Society could have banned compressors in refrigerators and electric lighting to preserve those livelihoods, but instead, society advanced, everyone's lives got better, and people found new livelihoods. So a colour of bits approach either applies to humans, and becomes an unworkable mess of every author you've ever read basically owns all your work, or it amounts to banning automation in cases where humans can legally do something.

The second problem with the colour of bits approach is that it would undermine a lot of things that we have already been doing for decades. Classifiers, for example, are often trained on copyrighted inputs, and make decisions about what category something is in. For example, most email clients let you flag a message as spam, and use that to decide if a future message is spam. A colour of bits approach would mean the model that decides whether or not a message is spam is copyright to whoever wrote the spam - and even the Yes/No decision is also copyright to them, and you'd need their permission to rely on it. Similarly for models that detect abuse or child pornography or terrorist material on many sites that accept user-generated content. Many more models that are incredibly important to day-to-day life would likely be impacted in the same way - so it would be incredibly disruptive to tech and life as we know it.

Another approach to extending copyright, also ill-advised, would be to extend copyright to protect more general elements like 'style', so that styles can be copyrighted even if another image doesn't look the same. If this was broadened a long way, it would probably just lead to constant battles between artists (or more likely, studios trying to shut down artists), and it is quite likely that no artist could ever publish anything without a high risk of being sued.

So copyright is probably not a viable solution here, so what is? As we move to a 'post-scarcity' economy, with things automated to the extent that we don't need that many humans working to produce an adequate quality of life for everyone, the best solution is a Universal Basic Income (UBI). Everyone who is making something in the future and generating profits is almost certainly using work from me, you, and nearly every person alive today (or their ancestors) to do so. But rather than some insanely complex computation about who contributed the most that becomes unworkable, just tax all profit to cover it, and pay a basic income to everyone. Then artists (and everyone else) can focus on meaning and not profit, knowing they will still get paid the UBI no matter what, and contribute back to the commons, and copyright as a concept can be essentially retired.

Here's my view: I like games, I want to make games. Not only do I want to make games, there are games I want to make which would require a massive team of people to accomplish. That's not cheap and I don't, nor will I likely ever have, the money to make them.

If I take it to a studio and say, "here's this game I want to make, here's a prototype showing how it'll play, the basic mechanics, here's some sketches show the general artstyle" and so forth, if they decide they like it (which is a huge if), my understanding is that they typically expect to receive ownership of the copyright for the game and all associated IPs. That means the game is no longer my game, it's now owned by the company. If I want to take that game to another company because I'm not happy with how the current company is handling it, well, that's too bad, it's not my game anymore. I don't even own the characters, the name, none of the stuff I originally pitched is mine anymore, it's now owned by the company.

AI, on the other hand, promises to eventually allow me to be able to generate models, animations, textures, and so on. This massively decreases the budget and staffing required to make the game a reality, potentially bringing the costs in line with something I can actually afford. The artists weren't replaced by AI because I couldn't afford to pay them in the first place. That's not a slight against them, I'd pay them up front if I could, but I can't; nor do I believe it's ethical or moral to string them along with the promise of profit sharing when I know full well that I'm not really interested in making a profit. I'm ultimately doing it because I want to and if I make money at it, then that's cool. If I promise to share any profit the game makes, there's a real potential that they might get pennies when they could have been making more money working for someone else. At that point I've selfishly taken food out of their mouths and wasted their time.

Being able to use AI to asset in game creation also means that while any AI-generated assets are public domain, I still get to keep whatever I made by hand, whether it's the script, the hero models, or even just the setting and character designs. I also get to have full oversight of what I'm making, I don't have to worry about business suits harassing me about whether or not my game is going to be profitable, how marketing analysis says I need to add X mechanic or focus on having Y graphics, or Z representation. It's my artistic vision, and while I may have used AI to assist in bringing it to fruition, they're simply pieces of a larger, human-created work.

Or I guess to put it another way, I understand why artists are upset by AI generating traditional artworks; however AI also has the future potential to reduce the barrier of entry for complex creative works to the point where even a highly complex game or AAA-quality movie could be done by a small group of friends, or even a single person. If you have the money, then you should absolutely pay your artists, but I also think it should be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Instead of painting it all with a broad brush, take into consideration whether or not it'd be realistically feasible for an individual or creative group to do it "right". How much was AI-generated? A little? A lot? All of it? How much is okay? Does it matter if the individual parts are generated by an AI if it was ultimately assembled and guided by a human? What situations would it be okay to use AI in? Is your view reasonable? Why or why not? Consider it not just from your perspective, but from the perspective of the person wanting to create their vision. Not all creative works are equal when it comes to the effort required to create them. Hell, not all games are equal in that regard. It's significantly easier to make a simple platformer or RPG than it is to create a Fallout or GTA.

I'm not gonna pretend I have the answers, I recognize how much damage AI can do to creative industries; however I also recognize that there's a lot of creativity going to waste because the barriers are so high for some types of creative works that AI is likely the only way they'll ever have the chance to see the light of day.

Make it make sense, Beehaw =(

Unfortunately AI is one of this community's blind spots so you're probably outta luck on this one. If it's not someone shyly giving themselves a pass for it because their use case is totally ethical and unlike other people using it, it's someone smugly laughing at people scared for their livelihoods as companies cut out more and more people to save a dollar here and there. The amount of people that welcome factory churned content slop will always outnumber those that still give a shit, best we can do is hope for some legislation that limits the more harmful aspects and learn to deal with the harm that can't be undone.

Embracing AI and automation as tools can actually enhance your skill set and help you create more impactful work. If you're in a creative field, this technology can elevate your projects to a whole new level.

What do you think should be the alternative then?

The way I see it, you could 1) not have any models at all, which I think is shortsighted 2) hand over exclusive control over these models to big tech companies that have the money to pay these artists 3) make creative commons models that will probably never be able to compete with the big tech models. 4) Perhaps ban anything except creative commons models for personal use?

I'd much rather AI models were freely available to everyone equally. Best compromise I could see is developing some legally binding metric that determines wether the output you want to use commercially is similar enough to some artist, so you have to reimburse them.