I agree that this is a plausible outcome, but I don’t think society should treat it as a settled question right now. It seems to me like the sort of technology question which a society should sit down and think about.
It is most similar to the human category, yes absolutely, but it enables different things than the human category. The consequences are dramatically different. So it’s not obvious a priori that it should be treated legally the same.
You argue against a complete ban by pointing out that not all relevant governments would cooperate. I don’t think all governments have to come to the same decision here. Copyright enforcement is already not equal across countries. I’m not saying I think there should be a complete ban, but again, I don’t think it’s totally obvious either, and I think artists calling for a ban should have a voice in the decision process.
But I also don’t agree with your argument that the only two options are a complete ban or treating it exactly like human-generated art. I don’t agree with your argument that a requirement to display the closest images from the training data would be useless. I agree that it is easily circumvented, but it does make it much easier to avoid accidental infringement by putting in prompts which happen to be good at pulling out exact duplicates of some datapoint, unbeknownst to you.
I also think it would be within the realm of reasonable possibility to simply apply different legal standards for infringement in the two cases. Perhaps it’s fine for human artists to copy a style, but because it’s so easy to do it with an AI, it is considered a form of infringement to copy a style that way. IDK, possibly that is a terrible idea, but my point is that it’s not clear to me that there are no options at all.
I agree that this is a plausible outcome, but I don’t think society should treat it as a settled question right now. It seems to me like the sort of technology question which a society should sit down and think about.
It is most similar to the human category, yes absolutely, but it enables different things than the human category. The consequences are dramatically different. So it’s not obvious a priori that it should be treated legally the same.
You argue against a complete ban by pointing out that not all relevant governments would cooperate. I don’t think all governments have to come to the same decision here. Copyright enforcement is already not equal across countries. I’m not saying I think there should be a complete ban, but again, I don’t think it’s totally obvious either, and I think artists calling for a ban should have a voice in the decision process.
But I also don’t agree with your argument that the only two options are a complete ban or treating it exactly like human-generated art. I don’t agree with your argument that a requirement to display the closest images from the training data would be useless. I agree that it is easily circumvented, but it does make it much easier to avoid accidental infringement by putting in prompts which happen to be good at pulling out exact duplicates of some datapoint, unbeknownst to you.
I also think it would be within the realm of reasonable possibility to simply apply different legal standards for infringement in the two cases. Perhaps it’s fine for human artists to copy a style, but because it’s so easy to do it with an AI, it is considered a form of infringement to copy a style that way. IDK, possibly that is a terrible idea, but my point is that it’s not clear to me that there are no options at all.