> Or maybe, get this, how about people running AI only feed them information that they legally have the right to use? How is it a bad thing that somebody can't legally steal other peoples' work without their permission because of pesky copyright?
On one extreme:
"Unless you pay your annual Disney fee for having watched Disney films in early childhood, you will need to return your brain to us for processing. Disney was used as the basis for all concepts you know, and as such, Disney owns all subsequent intellectual output of your brain."
And on the other:
In the age of AI, copyright will cease to hold weight. We'll make more new content on a per-month basis than all of recorded human history. The old regime must be thrown away to accommodate the radically new world we're entering.
We'll land somewhere in-between, and I'm hoping it's much closer to (or even precisely) the latter.
Very curious that so many people adopted this position exactly when it became feasible for giant corporations to profit by mass producing laundered copyrighted works!
Those wanting AI to respect copyright are going to find that the big players will navigate copyright just fine. It's the small players that won't. They're advocating for institutional control over AI.
One of the first commercial uses of modern neural networks was Microsoft laundering GPL code with Copilot, so I’m not really sure what you mean by saying that “big players will navigate copyright just fine”.
There are laws in the EU that only apply to large companies, like Facebook et. al. because they have much more power in certain spaces. Similar laws can be made for Disney vs. small studios, e.g. "if turnover is less than 100M EUR/month..." - I feel this is often proposed as a false dichotomy.
On one extreme:
"Unless you pay your annual Disney fee for having watched Disney films in early childhood, you will need to return your brain to us for processing. Disney was used as the basis for all concepts you know, and as such, Disney owns all subsequent intellectual output of your brain."
And on the other:
In the age of AI, copyright will cease to hold weight. We'll make more new content on a per-month basis than all of recorded human history. The old regime must be thrown away to accommodate the radically new world we're entering.
We'll land somewhere in-between, and I'm hoping it's much closer to (or even precisely) the latter.