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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Alright, I confess! Almost all of my training in computer programming came from copyrighted material. Put the cuffs on me!
You were trained and learned and are able to create new things.
AI poorly mimics thngs it has seen before.
The issue being raised is copyright infringement, not the quality of the results. Writers "borrow" each other's clever figures of speech all the time without payment or attribution. I'm sure I have often copypasted code without permission. AI does nothing on its own, it's always a tool used by human beings. I think the copyright argument against AI is built on a false distinction between using one tool vs another.
My larger argument is that nobody has an inherent right to control what everybody else does with some idea they've created. For many thousands of years people saw stuff and freely imitated it. Oh look, there's an "arch" - I think I'll build a building like that. Oh look, that tribe uses that root to make medicine, let's do the same thing. This process was known as "the spread of civilization" until somebody figured out that an authority structure could give people dibs on their ideas and force other people to pay to copy them. As we evolve more capabilities (like AI) I think it's time to figure out another way to reward creators without getting in the way of improvement, instead of hanging onto a "Hey, that's Mine!" mentality that does more to enrich copy producers than it does to enrich creators.
Yes, whether copyright should exist is a different discussion than how AI is violating it in a very different way than snippets being reused in different contexts as part of a new creative work.
Intentionally using a single line is very different than scooping up all the data and hitting a randomizer until it stumbles into some combination that happens to look usable. Kind of like how a single business jacking up prices is different than a monopoly jacking up all the prices.
Stripping away your carefully crafted wording, the differences fade away. "Hitting a randomizer" until usable ideas come out is an equally inaccurate description of either human creativity or AI. And again, the contention is that using AI violates copyright, not how it allegedly does that.
So the other thing with AI is the companies are not just making money on the output like an artist would. They are making bank on investors and stock market speculation that exists only because they scooped up massive amounts of copyrighted materials to create their output. It really isn't comparable to a single artist or even a collection of artists.
Again, AI doesn't do anything, any more than hammers and saws build houses. People use AI to do things. Anyway, profiting from investors and speculators without giving creators a piece of the action isn't a consequence of AI, it's how our whole system already works.