Technology

Yeah, there's gold wherever you look. I like:

First, copyright law doesn’t prevent you from making factual observations about a work or copying the facts embodied in a work (this is called the “idea/expression distinction”). Rather, copyright forbids you from copying the work’s creative expression in a way that could substitute for the original, and from making “derivative works” when those works copy too much creative expression from the original.

It's like sueing an artist because they learnt to paint based on your paintings. But also not because the company has acquired your art and fed it into an application.

It's a very tricky area.

If a human does art without input, you still get “something”.

Ok, take a human being that has never had any other interactions with any other human and has never consumed any content created by humans. Give him finger paint and have him paint something on a blank canvas. I think it wouldn't look any different than a chimpanzee doing finger paint.

it can’t train itself on its own data

In theory, it could. You would just need a way to quantify the "fitness" of a drawing. They do this by comparing to actual content. But you don't need actual content in some circumstances. For example, look at Alphazero - Deepmind's AI from a few years back for playing chess. All the AI knew was the rules of the game. It did not have access to any database of games. No data. The way it learned is it played millions of games against itself.

It trained itself on its own data. And that AI, at the time, beat the leading chess engine that has access to databases and other pre-built algorithms.

With art this gets trickier because art is subjective. You can quantify clearly whether you won or lost a chess game. How do you quantify if something is a good piece of art? If we can somehow quantify this, you could in theory create AI that generates art with no input.

We're in the infancy stages of this technology.

Humans can draw stuff, build structures, and make tools, in a way that improves upon the previous iteration. Each artists adds something, or combines things in a way that makes for something greater.

AI can do all of the same. I know it's scary but it's here and it isn't going away. AI designed systems are becoming more and more commonplace. Solar panels, medical devices, computer hardware, aircraft wings, potential drug compounds, etc. Certain things AI can be really good at, and designing things and testing it in a million different simulations is something that AI can do a lot better than humans.

AI art has NEVER made me feel like it’s greater than the sum of its parts

What is art? If I make something that means nothing and you find a meaning in it, is it meaningful? AI is a cold calculated mathematical model that produces meaningless output. But humans love finding patterns in noise.

Trust me, you will eventually see some sort of AI art that makes an impact on you. Math doesn't lie. If statistics can turn art into data and find the hidden patterns that make something impactful, then it can recreate it in a way that is impactful.

Sampling music is literally placing parts of that music in the final product. Gen AI is not placing pieces of other people's art in the final image, in fact it doesn't store any image data at all. Using an image in the training data is akin to an artist including that image on their moodboard. Except the AI's moodboard has way more images and the odds of the work being too similar to a single particular image is lower than when a human does it.

Are you speaking legally or morally when you say someone "aught" to do something?