I hope the law will converge to this: As a human, I don't need a license to look and get inspired by art. But I am not allowed to feed that same data to a machine as a training dataset without proper authorization from the owner.
Best outcome in my opinion would be for the output to be judged on a case-by-case basis, like human works are, not for machine learning on data without "proper authorization from the owner" to inherently count as infringement.
More moderately, all art is derivative at the end of the day. None of it was created ex nihilo. We already have legal guardrails for direct reproduction of specific characters and specific pieces, and that is plenty. The fact that maximalists want to kill a nascent technology by restricting the right to learn from, something that even our extremely slanted laws have carveouts for, is nothing short of offensive.
If it is art, then it will be made both by patronage and by people saying: "Hey StableChatSiri, make me some art."
(People will still do the later even if it doesn't count as art).
Hm. Thinking of patrons, does anyone know how many artists and sculptors there were in 1710 England?
I keep programming computers just because I like it. Maybe they'll keep creating too for the same reasons. Maybe they won't. It's irrelevant either way.
The nihilistic feeling that it's irrelevant whether new art is created kindof proves my point.
Because when I have access to these tools I will make better art than the technocrat with access to these tools?
You’ve got a lot of knots to untangle.
The use of including copyrighted materials in the trained model was a choice, not some obvious fact about the nature of AI. All of this could've been avoided if the data set did not include unlicensed work in the first place.
If your AI is limited to only training on the paucity of explicitly permissibly licensed/public domain content (and as I think about it more, this would only apply to things that are permissibly licensed without an attribution requirement, which is something there is no meaningful way to do in a model like the one we are discussing) your AI will not be very useful. With that in mind, I would argue that yes, it absolutely is an obvious fact about its nature.