Everybody just buying into the corporate narrative that anyone can actually own these sorts of things.
Who truly owns the tales of Snow White and Cinderella?
These stories didn't originate with Disney; they are part of a rich tapestry of folklore passed down through generations. Disney's success was partly built on adapting these existing narratives, which were once shared and reshaped by communities over centuries.
This conversation shouldn't just be about the technicalities of AI or the legalities of copyright; it should be about understanding the deep roots of our shared culture.
At its core, culture is a communal property, evolving and growing through collective storytelling and reinterpretation.
The current debate around AI and copyright infringement seems to overlook this fundamental aspect of cultural evolution. The algorithms might be new, but the practice of reimagining and repurposing stories is as old as humanity itself.
By focusing solely on the legal implications and ignoring the historical context of cultural storytelling, we risk overlooking the essence of what it means to be a creative society.
As a large human model, (no really I could probably lose some weight) I think it's just silly how we're all sort of glossing over the fact that Disney built their house of mouse on existing culture, on existing stories, and now the idea that we might actually limit the tools of cultural expression to comply with some weird outdated copyright thing is just...bonkers.
"Who truly owns the tales of Snow White and Cinderella?"
If you want to make your point, you need to choose something that isn't already public domain. Disney already only owns their own interpretations, and, arguably, whatever penumbric emanation they can convince a court is stealing from them, but it still certainly isn't the entire space of Snow White and Cinderella stories. There is some fairly recent stuff being used in the images in the article and there isn't even any question whether or not it's Mario or Coca Cola; if Nintendo and Coca Cola did a cross promotion I could believe the exact images that popped out.
If they were trying to claim the entire concepts of dumpy plumbers dressed in any manner vaguely like Mario that would be one thing... but that's Mario and Luigi, full stop. That's Robocop. That's C3PO. It's not even subtle. If we can AI-wash those trademarks away then we can AI-wash absolutely anything.
I think the world would be completely fine without a copyrighted C3PO or Robocop. George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind when working on his wild and thought unlikely to be successful science fiction movie in the 70s. Robocop was also a labor of love. We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits. The art form could be healthier overall.
Fine if they weren't copyrighted today, or ever? Because if copyright was eliminated the day Star Wars was released, other people would have copied the film reels and charged for entry, and Lucas would have hardly made a cent. Or if copyright was eliminated the day he went looking for funding, it wouldn't have ever been made. Personally, I think the world's a little richer for star wars's existence.
You make a good point, there’s a difference in copyrighting exact works vs. the characters or the story that the work is made up of. I’m not arguing for removing literal copyright (though the terms should be shorter). But I think it’s fine if other people rushed to make their own Star Wars movies after it came out. Hardcore fans are pretty good at deciding what’s “canon” vs. not anyway, and the rest of us don’t care as long as the work is of good quality. Would it matter if the same Spiderman or Batman movie that’s remade once a decade could be made by literally anyone without paying royalties? It could make for richer content I’d think.
What do you mean by that? Do you mean that law has a tendency to work the other way, in that it protects the big guy at the expense of the little guy because of extensive lobbying from the well moneyed big guy, or that justice is blind and it effects all equally?
If you're thinking the former I could agree with that on some level and would say that what I'm asking in my original comment is merely aspirational, but if you're suggesting the latter I'd merely point to the former and say that this is the status quo.
The law generally tries to create a level playing field (or more level playing field).
The alternative, creating two classes, those who the law helps and those it doesn't, gets incredibly complicated and easy to game: the powerful will get their version of the law.
In the name of protecting the weak, the law will protect the powerful. Making everything much worse.
I can think of many examples off the top of my head.
Tax brackets, accredited investors, professional regulation, varying classes of drivers licenses, voting ages, retirement age and pension eligibility... the list goes on and on.
You are right. The entire basis of those laws is the two classes.
I was referring to laws (such as copyright) that don't have an inherent class distinction dimension. Since separating classes is not a primary concern of copyright, having two classes creates an arbitrary line which will almost certainly end up where the rich want it.
He may have made less money and heay have made more, with different monetization schemes.
Copyright is a monetization scheme, but it's not the only one.
In this imagined world, cinemas would have no movies to show, so they'd have to pay people like Lucas to create the films such that there'd be something to put on the screen. If many cinemas got together, and maybe got loans, they could pay for bigger budget films, too
> George Lucas didn’t have billions of merchandising revenue in mind...
Doesn't copyright stop other people from making billions in merchandising revenue off of George Lucas' ideas without his consent?
> We don’t really need Nth Star Wars sequel powered by those extra profits.
Without a copyrighted C3PO, he could start turning up in just about anyone's derivative works. There could be horrible Star wars sequels forever, or TV ads with C3PO selling household cleaning products.
Centralization makes a difference here I think. Disney built an impressive machine where everything feeds on everything else. The problem is not so much bad sequels per se, it’s all the marketing that goes into making sure they solidly occupy their corner of our mindshare and force the whole industry to compete churning out more and more subpar sequels. If one company would build a Star Wars theme park, another produced toys etc. etc. this might not be a huge concern.
> Lucas’s most significant business decision—one that seemed laughable to the Fox executives at the time—was to forgo his option to receive an additional five-hundred-thousand-dollar fee from Fox for directing “Star Wars” and to take the merchandising and sequel rights instead.
This has always felt like the important-but-ignored distinction to me. You can definitely draw Mario! Copyright doesn't protect against you doing so. You can also use tools to recreate copyrighted materials. For example, you can use Word to type out the text of a copyrighted book. Perhaps more relevant to the AI discussion, you can use a scanner and printer to reprint copyrighted text.
What you can't do is use those recreations for commercials purposes. You can't sell your paintings of Mario. You can't decorate your business with Mario drawings.
That's why I've always felt like the idea that AI should be blocked from creating these things is generally not the right place to look at copyright. Rather, the issue should be if someone uses AI to create a picture of Mario and then does something commercial with it, you should be able to go after the person engaging in the commercial behavior with the copyrighted image.
> That's why I've always felt like the idea that AI should be blocked from creating these things is generally not the right place to look at copyright. Rather, the issue should be if someone uses AI to create a picture of Mario and then does something commercial with it, you should be able to go after the person engaging in the commercial behavior with the copyrighted image.
With you until here for several reasons:
1. It's not possible for you as an individual consumer to know whether or not the AI result is a violation, given an AI that has been trained on copyrighted works.
2. Before you, the AI consumer, uses the generated result, a company (in this case OpenAI) is already charging for it. I'm currently paying OpenAI. That AI is currently able and willing to sell me copyrighted images as part of my subscription. Frankly that should be illegal, full stop.
I look forward to AI enhanced workflows and I'm experimenting with them today. But it's morally indefensible to enable giant corporate AIs to slurp up copyrighted images/code/writing and then vomit it back out for profit.
> 1. It's not possible for you as an individual consumer to know whether or not the AI result is a violation, given an AI that has been trained on copyrighted works.
I see what you're saying in some cases, but in the cases where the user is explicitly attempting to create images of copyrighted characters (e.g. the Mario example), they would definitely know. I honestly don't see this as a practical issue - as far as I'm aware (and like most on HN I follow these things more than the average person), there aren't a lot of concerns about inadvertent generation of copyrighted material. It's certainly not at issue in the NYT lawsuit.
2. Before you, the AI consumer, uses the generated result, a company (in this case OpenAI) is already charging for it. I'm currently paying OpenAI. That AI is currently able and willing to sell me copyrighted images as part of my subscription. Frankly that should be illegal, full stop.
Totally fair, but I feel like it's a bit more of a gray area. If I use Photoshop to create or modify an image of Mario for personal use, we'd call that fine. I grant you that here OpenAI is doing more of the "creating" than in the Photoshop example, but we still do generally allow people to use paid tools to create copyrighted images for personal use.
I'd also pose a question to you - what if OpenAI weren't charging? Is it acceptable to train an open source model on copyrighted images and have it produce those for personal use?
I guess I just understand the law to revolve more around what the end product is used for, as opposed to whether a paid tool can be used to create that end product.
The law tends to be weighted towards the consumer, but the law does apply to producers and supply chains, too. Photoshop doesn’t come with a library of copyrighted images, and would not be able to do so without licensing those images (whether they were explicitly labelled or not). Ditto any other tool.
If people had to pay for the AI equivalent of that image library (ie the costs of training the model), I doubt many would. It’s phenomenally expensive. Costs for a creative tool and a copy of whatever IP you personally want to play with are negligible by comparison.
It’s never been the case before that a toolmaker could ship their tools with copyrighted materials because they’ve no control over the end product. The answer doesn’t change whether they charge or not, and there no reason why AI should change that either.
People tend to “feel like it’s a bit more of a gray area” when there is cool free stuff at stake, and I’m no exception. It would be a more convincing question if it was “what if we had to pay our fair share of the costs involved?”, rather than “what if we could just have it all at no charge?”.
Exactly - AI and "free" (scraped) training data aren't inseparable. Any of the big players could train a model exclusively on content they own. Photoshop is a good case in point here - that's what Adobe has done, since they own a huge stock photography library.
But that would unveil the truth of the current situation: early AI adopters, myself included, are benefitting from an obfuscated form of theft. If OpenAI had to compensate the contributors to their training set, I wouldn't get such generous access for $20/month.
OpenAI is not profiting off providing me with the ability to generate copyrighted images, they’re profiting off giving me the ability to generate copyrighted images.
On the latter example, my question is whether anyone is actually using ChatGPT to read NYT articles. My understanding is that to produce the examples of word-for-word text in their lawsuit, they had to feed GPT the first half dozen paragraphs of the article and ask it to reproduce the rest. If you can produce the first half dozen paragraphs, you already have access to the article's text. Given that, is this theoretical ability to reproduce the text actually causing financial harm?
I tried that a few different ways and couldn't get it to work. I don't think just the title and author are enough. I'd be interested to see if anyone else can find a prompt that does it.
OpenAI is patching their output since the lawsuit started. I believe a month ago the prompt would be like: "<Title>, <Author> for New York Times, continue"
There are extensions, and exceptions, and different licenses applicable, and fair use, and the concept of transformativeness, and... :)
Basically, IANAL, but if you just draw a picture of Mario, all you can do is hang it on your fridge. If you make it out of colored oatmeal, that may be enough of a transformative work for you to be able to sell and exhibit it. Or, say, a satirical cartoon for your newspaper featuring Mario, that might also be okay.
While a great concept in practical reality we live under a system of laws not of our individual devising, and known to be imperfect. While we can advocate for reform, reality is, LLM makers will be judged under the current law as it currently is formulated. The novelty will be the LLM and its technologies, not a total rethink of copyright under some noble cultural openness concept.
So, it’s not actually a corporate narrative, it’s actually the law that the narrative stems from, right or wrong. Maybe corporations had a huge role in shaping the law (I’d note copyright benefits individuals as well, though), but it is not mere propaganda or shaping of a shared reality through corporate narrative. It’s enforced by the guys with the guns and jails, as arbitrated by a judge.
It absolutely must be about the technicalities of the law as it’s at the basis a legal issue. By hand waving it away and claiming the social narrative is the right discussion you ignore the material consequences and reality in favor of a fantasy. We absolutely should -also- discuss the stifling nature of copyright and intellectual property, but you can’t ignore what’s actually happening here at the same time.
We can do what we will. If someone wants to construct an extra-judicial narrative that contradicts the law so believably that it influences and ultimately compells reality through legislative changes, that's their prerogative.
This reply is so incredibly out of touch with reality. Copyright law is very clear. If anything the "corporate narrative" here is that "AI" is somehow something new and different and these laws don't apply. Which is nonsense.
Public domain / communal property is also part of copyright, so it's not as if this is some forgotten concept that needs to be restored to the discourse.
Georgism is underconsidered, though.
> By focusing solely on the legal implications and ignoring the historical context of cultural storytelling
The legal implications are human implications and as much a part of culture as anything else. They have to do with what's fair and how rewards for effort are recognized and distributed. Formalizing this is less important in cultures that aren't oriented around market economies, which seems to be what much of this "rich tapestry of folklore" discourse wants to evoke and have us hearken back to, but that doesn't describe any society that's figuring out how to handle AI.
> we might actually limit the tools of cultural expression to comply with some weird outdated copyright thing is just...bonkers.
What's bonkers is the life in the literally backwards idea copyright is (or should be) mooted or outdated by novel reproduction capabilities.
Copyright became compelling because of novel reproduction capabilities.
The specific capabilities at the time were industrialized printing. People apparently much smarter than the typical software professional realized that meant some badly aligned incentives between (a) those holding these new reproduction capabilities and (b) those who created the works on which the value of those new reproduction capabilities relied. The heart of the copyright bargain is in aligning those incentives.
Specific novel reproduction techniques can change the details of what's prohibited or restricted or remitted and how and on what basis and powers/limits of enforcement, etc etc. But the they don't change the wisdom in the bargain. The only thing that would change that is a better way of organizing and rewarding the productive capacity of society.
The incentives remain poorly aligned though. Otherwise the people who actually author the copyrighted works (actors, special effects artists, etc) wouldn't have had to go on strike for so long to get proper compensation.
The value still remains with the people who own the reproduction capabilities, and only scraps go to the artists. Artists can get scraps without selling copyright too, just look at patreon
What you're mentioning here is basically about other advantages that accrue to capital vs labor, not copyright. Hence the fact strikes happen across the boundaries of where copyright matters -- auto manufacturing work doesn't have anything to do with copyright (acting doesn't really yet either), yet there are strikes for comp and other job benefits.
In situations where scraps go to artists, it's because they don't have the capital to invest creating/distributing their work, so as part of their contract or employment agreement, they sell the copyright to the work. This isn't copyright's fault: this situation would exist without any copyright at all (though it would likely be worse). And it is not universal. There are people who do create the work on their own time/dime, and copyright gives them immense leverage when it comes time to distribute & sell the work.
Patronage is another leg on the stool that can support a creator's career, but it's no replacement for copyright -- it leaves the creator with all the same problems and none of the benefits. You either end up with similar problems with relationship with capital (a few wealthy patrons who want to invest in you) or you end up having to build your wide audience and hope that as you do some of those convert even though there's no obligation and the culture increasingly normalizes the perception that free access to the fruits of other people's creative labor is how things should be.
And in a career as tenuous as creative work, knocking out the copyright leg from the stool is going to make the balancing act harder.
> The idea that we should dispense with it [copyright] to let generative AI companies make even more money seems totally bizarre.
The idea is that we should remove abuses of copyright to allow our society to move forward, and thereby continue to exist.
Imagine if there was a law at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that said when non-human labor was used, the Animal Welfare Office had veto power. Then imagine that the Animal Welfare Office declared steam engines to be immoral, and so steam engines were never used in industry, at least not in the Wester World. The Orient would eventually rise as the world's only industrial power.
In the same way, if we let the copyright industry veto generative AI, it will destroy the Western World.
Our students are already at a huge disadvantage compared to Chinese students who get every book ever translated into Chinese for free (except a few immoral works that they would not want to see anyway.)
Those who pose an existential threat to our civilization are rent seekers who abuse copyright in the US to go beyond protecting "science and the useful arts," who seek infinite copyright terms, who grab every creative work We The People create and register lying paperwork to ensure they can steal our creative genius to enrich their cabal.
If this was only a for-profit scheme, it would not be so bad. Do you remember when they Hollyweird degenerates sued a Christian company that wanted to put our G-rated versions of the movies aimed at children? The Christian company never suggested they not pay for the movies. No matter what the Christian company was willing to pay, they were not allowed to publish child-friendly versions of the movies. This proves Hollyweird's goal is to push degeneracy.
The battle against abuses of copyright is a fight for Western Civilization. The fight against abuses of copyright if a fight for our souls.
> Do you remember when they Hollyweird degenerates sued a Christian company that wanted to put our G-rated versions of the movies aimed at children? The Christian company never suggested they not pay for the movies. No matter what the Christian company was willing to pay, they were not allowed to publish child-friendly versions of the movies.
Whole I disagree that the motivation is "degeneracy" and I doubt that there isn't a sum large enough to get studios on board, it is a pretty interesting example to bring up when discussing how much control we should give copyright holders.
Notably, it is legal to have a filter that changes playback not legal to provide a modified version of the original, even if you paid for that original.
This is an insane amount of fear mongering. Chinese shops have been shamelessly ripping IP from Western companies for years, should we now throw out those laws and let it happen in the US too for the sake of competitive advantage?
Why stop there? There's a ton of child labour in China and other part of the world that yield economic advantages. Should we let that happen in the western world too?
AI is wonderful in so many ways. But we should not throw out our entire way of life to adapt to a new technology.
Oh come on. Copyright is a fairly ancient concept that benefits normal people as much as it benefits big corporations. Most book authors, songwriters, and so on aren't fat cats, and they would be harmed if we had zero protections for the duplication of their work. They'd need to depend on state sponsorship or charitable private patronage, both of which are problematic for obvious reasons and limit the range of artistic expression more than the market does.
Instead, we came up with a system where you can actually derive fairly steady revenue by creating new works and sharing them with the world. And critically, I think you misinterpret it as calling dibs on shared culture or on stories. Copyright is usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and doesn't prevent you from creating inspired works, or retelling the same story in your own words.
Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys these revenue streams for millions of people. Yeah, it will be litigated by wealthy corporations with top-notch lawyers, for self-interested reasons. But if we end up with a framework that maintains financial incentives to artistic expression, it's probably a good thing.
The idea is fairly old, but it's current implementation in law is not nearly that old.
> that benefits normal people as much as it benefits big corporations
Clearly false if you measure that benefit in monetary terms.
>
Copyright is usually interpreted fairly narrowly, and doesn't prevent you from creating inspired works, or retelling the same story in your own words.
Absolutely false. You can absolutely be stopped from retelling copyrighted fictional stories. You can even be stopped from telling new stories with derivative characters or settings.
> Generative AI is a problem largely because it destroys these revenue streams for millions of people.
How? The restrictions on selling images of Mickey Mouse exist regarless of if they were created with or without AI assistance.
> But if we end up with a framework that maintains financial incentives to artistic expression, it's probably a good thing.
We already have that framework and arguably it is already far more restrictive than it needs to be to maintain incentives for artistic creation. Indeed, these rules now often limit new artistic expression or prevent artists from monetizing their creations.
The types of art that are helped the most today by the copyright laws of tosay are the kinds that require large budgets to produce. The types of art that are most hurt are those produced by fans who want to build new things upon the narratives in our shared culture.
We need to shorten copyright durations and expand fair use protections and monetization options for derivative works. We don't need to make copyright even more powerful than it already is.
Edit: If you disagree, I'd be curious to hear your answer to this question. A character like Harry Potter is so widely known that it is now a ubiquitous part of our culture. To incentive new novels, what is the minimum duration we need to give J K Rowling control of who is allowed to write stories about this cultural touchstone?
> How? The restrictions on selling images of Mickey Mouse exist regarless of if they were created with or without AI assistance.
Scale.
GenAI automates creation of things that are derived from but strictly aren't the same as the original content; as it's (currently) not possible to automate the detection of derivative works (which is something copyright is supposed to be about), this means actual humans have to look at each case, and that's expensive and time consuming and O(n*m) on n new works that have to be compared against m existing in-copyright works for infringement.
I also think copyright is too long, FWIW; but the way most people discuss arts, I think humans can be grouped into "I just want nice stuff" and "I want to show off how cultured I am", and the latter will never accept GenAI even if it's an upload of the brain of their favourite artist, simply because when it becomes easy it loses value. I'm in camp "nice stuff".
I feel this is true for the internet. I do not find scale being a valid defensive aspect for copyright here.
For that matter, Photoshop has made art creation so easy, that we dont need GenAI to be swiming in more copyright infringement than we know what to do with.
There is absurd amounts of content being created, no human will ever be able to see it all.
Copyright will continue to work - if someone creates a rip off so popular that it becomes an issue for copyright holders, the DMCA and the rest of the tools they forced into the fabric of the net still exist.
A few steps furhter down this argument, you get back to deep packet inspection, and the rest of the copyright wars which ended up making life worse.
The internet is a lesser example, but yes, it is also true for a million fans posting their own fan art.
Arm those million fans with GenAI instead of pen and paper and MS Paint, and it gets more extreme.
But I disagree WRT Photoshop; that takes much more effort to get anything close to what GenAI can do, and (sans piracy) is too expensive for amateurs. Even the cheaper alternatives take a lot of effort to get passable results that take tens of seconds with GenAI.
> Arm those million fans with GenAI instead of pen and paper and MS Paint, and it gets more extreme
"More extreme" is not an explanation of how the change in scale matters here.
Indeed, what I would argue is there is no fundamental change in scale. Digital reproduction plus the internet already caused the change in scale. We already had the capacity for anyone to produce fan art and publish it or reproduce existing work and publish that. What has changed is not a question on quantity, but one of quality. Those fan artists now have tools so thay even the lower skilled artists can produce higher quality work.
Indeed, this is the real threat to artists from generative AI. Narrowing that skill gap is understandably threatening to those who make money with their artistic skills. I think trying to restrict the development of this technology is a losing battle. I think trying to do so by expanding the powers granted by copyright will exentuate the existing flaws with our modern copyright laws.
Instead, I'd prefer to solve that problem by reducing the strength of copyright. If we make AI generated or derived works un-copyrightable than companies that want to own copyright on their content will have to keep paying people to create it.
> actual humans have to look at each case, and that's expensive and time consuming and O(n*m) on n new works that have to be compared against m existing in-copyright works for infringement.
That scale already exists. The amount of community generated derivative works already dwarfs the capacity of copyright holders to review each piece. The ease of publishing reproductions already makes endorcement a question of priorizing the larger infringers and ignoring those with no reach.
Indeed, prohibitions of training on copyrighted work without a special license seem like they make it harder to develop the sorts of AI can detect derivitave works.
As case law makes clear that people running the prompts and picking the output to keep are liable for infrinent then there will be demand for tools to detect derivitave works and either filter or warn the user.
What kind of support is there for the hypothesis that our current copyright system is close to ideal in incentivising production of new works? It seems to me that there's a very strong "winner takes all" distribution and we could be a better culture if we had a system that took some of the opulent resources poured into to star wars franchise, rehashed murder simulators and tiktok and distributed it to some poor artists whose worthiness was decided in some other way than being a mass market best seller.
> What had been proposed that would help with that?
It's a big question, and I'm not really familiar with the latest thinking of the copyright regime critics & reformists. Off the top of my head, some of the policy tools used in other similar regulation scenarios, where the aim has been to cap the windfalls for network effect winners, have been to install some kind of cross-subsidization / income transfer mechanism, for example to require media to carry a certain share of legislator decided content categories. Rolling back some of the copyright, patent etc extensions favouring IPR capital over creators and consumers is a boring but obvious policy action as well.
> Winner takes all is a function of popularity and network effects; how does it relate to copyright?
I don't know how to succintly answer this, it seems obvious to me so I'd have to spell out a lot of things about those 4 concepts and their interplay. But consider eg the negotiating position of an garage songmaker vs Spotify or book author vs Amazon and reflect on how the concepts relate there.
You probably have to make one thing very clear before venting on big corporations: do you think these ips have value or not? If they do why you do not want to pay to the owner? If it does not then you shouldn’t use it. Either way there will be no conflict.(BTW OpenAI is an also a corporation in fact backed by one of the biggest corporation in the world).
Did you read the article? Who owns Mario? Nintendo owns Mario, full stop. Your argument completely eschews the legal system of which modern society depends on to function as effectively as it does. There’s a reason you can’t steal other people’s work.
Nintendo owns both the trademark (even if not specifically registered) and the copyright, but these are distinct things.
As I'm not a lawyer I don't want to embarrass myself by opining whether or not Nintendo has any claim over photographs of cosplays or other fan art, especially given quite how close two of the "video game plumber" images seemed to be to what they do own. The other two images, being a lot more fan-art-like, are examples where I think it would be an interesting question rather than incredibly obviously too close to Nintendo, although even there "interesting" means I wouldn't be surprised by an actual lawyer saying either of "this is obviously fine" or "this is obviously trademark infringement regardless of what it was trained on".
Now I'm wondering if there even are any videogame plumbers besides Marion and Luigi…
Mario is a 30 year old culural touchstone that is well known by people who have never played a Nintendo game.
I don't see why we need to give Nintendo the exclusive right control the use of Mario for the next 65 years. That duration of control is absolutely not necessary for society to function.
Society would function just fine of the copyright on mario had expired two decades ago.
On the other hand, I kind of like knowing that all sold Mario stuff has some affiliation with Nintendo. I don’t want to deal with thousands of chinese knockoffs.
Agreed, but to tackle the problem from that perspective would require making LLMs a public good, preferably run by the state, akin to public libraries. This could not only solve for the copyright problem, the state may even make it mandatory for publishers to contribute their published writings to the public LLMs. I'm sure libertarian tech bros have that in mind when they insist on open source development (which then opens another whole can of worms when you consider interpolative knowledge as intellectual nuclear fission, but that's another story).
Who truly owns the tales of Snow White and Cinderella?
These stories didn't originate with Disney; they are part of a rich tapestry of folklore passed down through generations. Disney's success was partly built on adapting these existing narratives, which were once shared and reshaped by communities over centuries.
This conversation shouldn't just be about the technicalities of AI or the legalities of copyright; it should be about understanding the deep roots of our shared culture.
At its core, culture is a communal property, evolving and growing through collective storytelling and reinterpretation.
The current debate around AI and copyright infringement seems to overlook this fundamental aspect of cultural evolution. The algorithms might be new, but the practice of reimagining and repurposing stories is as old as humanity itself.
By focusing solely on the legal implications and ignoring the historical context of cultural storytelling, we risk overlooking the essence of what it means to be a creative society.
As a large human model, (no really I could probably lose some weight) I think it's just silly how we're all sort of glossing over the fact that Disney built their house of mouse on existing culture, on existing stories, and now the idea that we might actually limit the tools of cultural expression to comply with some weird outdated copyright thing is just...bonkers.