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.
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.