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Comment by derektank | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the reproduction of the signature itself is a copyright violation, I’m not sure what the smallest unit of an existing work you can reproduce legally is, but reproducing a style is in no way a copyright offense. Artists do that all the time

Perhaps we need to create a new form of intellectual property to protect innovations in style. But that’s not copyright, which protects existing works from unauthorized reproduction. It seems like it would be very difficult to adjudicate though; how do you assess whether a style is truly unique to an author or artist?

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> Artists do that all the time

This is exactly the sort of anthropomorphism I'm talking about.

Yes, human artists reproduce styles all the time, but implying this equivalence between what a human does when they recreate a style, and what an AI model has done when its output is suspiciously similar to a single artist's "contributions" to the training set is reductive since the mechanism is obviously completely different. It doesn't say anything about whether one ought to be allowed, just because the other is, but the assumption that it should is doing the legwork for those who benefit from AI as a copyright washing machine.

My point in saying that artists do this all the time is to say that there is a very long legal tradition which says that artists doing this does not violate copyright, rather than tediously listing the relevant cases.

My point is not that the process is the same. That’s not relevant to the law. What’s relevant is whether or not the material is a reproduction that substantially infringes upon the original.

I’m also not making an ought argument. If you want to change the law, write your congressman. What I’m arguing is that existing legal doctrine on copyright law very clearly does not protect mere ideas or styles.

As I understand the process is very relevant to the law: why things like clean-room reverse engineering can be necessary.

> What I’m arguing is that existing legal doctrine on copyright law very clearly does not protect mere ideas or styles.

Like it or not, it is anthropomorphizing to claim that an algorithm can have ideas or use styles, rather than just saying that the apparent "ideas" and "styles" in its output are a mathematical derivation of the human ideas and styles in the copyrighted material in its training set.

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