I agree that fundamentally original art has traits that make it better than fundamentally plagiarized art.
However, humans can plagiarize too. We do it a bunch, although I’d argue that on the whole, art plagiarized by an AI will look “better” than art plagiarized by a human. While the best human plagiarists may create better work than the best AIs for now, the average human plagiarist (perhaps a child or teen tracing drawing their favorite copyrighted character) creates output far below the quality that the average AI can generate.
When you make the question about what species of entity created a piece of art instead of whether the art is original in the way that makes it better, it would follow that a human plagiarist creates a higher quality product than a robotic one, in ways that directly contradicts my experience of AI vs human plagiarism.
What I find wrong with saying “human” to mean “person” is what others have found wrong with with saying “man” or “citizen” to mean “person” in the past. If you can imagine AIs eventually being “people” in a way that would render them deserving of empathy, it’s hard to justify normalizing species-based linguistic shortcuts that allow the accident of one’s birth to artificially cap one’s maximum attainable value in society.
Then again, I believe that if “person” is a status that an entity has to prove that it deserves, humans should prove their way into it just like we expect other creatures and entities to do. This concept is neither popular nor practical to implement.
Oh, sure, my claim wasn’t “human art is necessarily better”. Rather, it was about the legal aspects. Copyright law is (supposedly) designed to incentivize and foster human creativity. Thus it protects the works of humans, while allowing humans to do transformative and derivative works (specific limits vary by country) because obviously creativity without any inspiration is an absurd notion. So, it is perfectly possible for example to define copyright law as “it allows humans to learn from copyrighted works and only humans” without having to go in some kind of convoluted philosophical explanation for why the learning of a diffusion model isn’t quite like that of a human. I’ve seen people literally argue about the differences between our brain’s visual cortex and a diffusion model and it’s pointless sophistry. They could be perfectly identical, but if a company built a vat-grown disembodied visual cortex and used it as a generative art model I’d still call bullshit on giving it the same rights as a human in terms of IP.
If you can imagine AIs eventually being “people” in a way that would render them deserving of empathy, it’s hard to justify normalizing species-based linguistic shortcuts that allow the accident of one’s birth to artificially cap one’s maximum attainable value in society.
I honestly can’t imagine that being a problem soon—I think AIs can grow powerful but making them persons is a whole other level of complexity. I agree that decreeing the status of person is a difficult thing, though I honestly think we should just grant it to all human beings by default. But still, it is at least not something that should come automatically with intelligence alone. I see the risk of us erroneously mistreating person-things for now much further away than the risk of letting non-person-things needlessly make us more miserable, as a short term thing.
I agree that fundamentally original art has traits that make it better than fundamentally plagiarized art.
However, humans can plagiarize too. We do it a bunch, although I’d argue that on the whole, art plagiarized by an AI will look “better” than art plagiarized by a human. While the best human plagiarists may create better work than the best AIs for now, the average human plagiarist (perhaps a child or teen tracing drawing their favorite copyrighted character) creates output far below the quality that the average AI can generate.
When you make the question about what species of entity created a piece of art instead of whether the art is original in the way that makes it better, it would follow that a human plagiarist creates a higher quality product than a robotic one, in ways that directly contradicts my experience of AI vs human plagiarism.
What I find wrong with saying “human” to mean “person” is what others have found wrong with with saying “man” or “citizen” to mean “person” in the past. If you can imagine AIs eventually being “people” in a way that would render them deserving of empathy, it’s hard to justify normalizing species-based linguistic shortcuts that allow the accident of one’s birth to artificially cap one’s maximum attainable value in society.
Then again, I believe that if “person” is a status that an entity has to prove that it deserves, humans should prove their way into it just like we expect other creatures and entities to do. This concept is neither popular nor practical to implement.
Oh, sure, my claim wasn’t “human art is necessarily better”. Rather, it was about the legal aspects. Copyright law is (supposedly) designed to incentivize and foster human creativity. Thus it protects the works of humans, while allowing humans to do transformative and derivative works (specific limits vary by country) because obviously creativity without any inspiration is an absurd notion. So, it is perfectly possible for example to define copyright law as “it allows humans to learn from copyrighted works and only humans” without having to go in some kind of convoluted philosophical explanation for why the learning of a diffusion model isn’t quite like that of a human. I’ve seen people literally argue about the differences between our brain’s visual cortex and a diffusion model and it’s pointless sophistry. They could be perfectly identical, but if a company built a vat-grown disembodied visual cortex and used it as a generative art model I’d still call bullshit on giving it the same rights as a human in terms of IP.
I honestly can’t imagine that being a problem soon—I think AIs can grow powerful but making them persons is a whole other level of complexity. I agree that decreeing the status of person is a difficult thing, though I honestly think we should just grant it to all human beings by default. But still, it is at least not something that should come automatically with intelligence alone. I see the risk of us erroneously mistreating person-things for now much further away than the risk of letting non-person-things needlessly make us more miserable, as a short term thing.