>But I'm also a musician/artist and so I find some of these conversations odd. The problem with them I see is that they are oversimplified. To get better at drawing I often copy other works. Or I'll play a piece exactly as intended. Then I get more advanced and learn a style of someone I admire and appreciate. Then after that comes my own flair.
>So I ask, what is different between me doing it and a machine?
You are a human. If you practice art as a hobby you can feel pleasure doing it, or you can get informal value out of the practice (there is social value in showing and sharing hobbies and works with friends). One could try to formalize that value and make a profession out of it, get livelihood selling it.
When all that "machinery" to (learn to) produce artistic works was sitting inside human skulls and difficult to train, the benefits befell on the humans.
When it is a machine that can easily and cheaply automate ... the benefits are due to the owner of machine.
Now, I don't personally know if the genie can be put back into bottle with any legal framework that wouldn't be monstrous in some other way. However, ethically it is quite clear to me there is a possibility the artists / illustrators are going to get a very bad deal out of this, which could be a moral wrong. This would be a reason to think up the legal and conceptual framework that tries to make it not ... as wrong as it could be.
It could be that we end up with human art as a prestige good (which it already is). That wouldn't be nice, because of power law dynamics of popularity already benefit very few prestige artists. So it could get worse. But could we end up with a Wall-E world where there are no reason for anyone to learn to draw any well? When a kid asks "draw me a rabbit", they won't ask any of the humans around, they ask the machine. The machine can produce a much more prettier rabbit, immediately and tailored to their taste.
>So I ask, what is different between me doing it and a machine?
You are a human. If you practice art as a hobby you can feel pleasure doing it, or you can get informal value out of the practice (there is social value in showing and sharing hobbies and works with friends). One could try to formalize that value and make a profession out of it, get livelihood selling it.
When all that "machinery" to (learn to) produce artistic works was sitting inside human skulls and difficult to train, the benefits befell on the humans.
When it is a machine that can easily and cheaply automate ... the benefits are due to the owner of machine.
Now, I don't personally know if the genie can be put back into bottle with any legal framework that wouldn't be monstrous in some other way. However, ethically it is quite clear to me there is a possibility the artists / illustrators are going to get a very bad deal out of this, which could be a moral wrong. This would be a reason to think up the legal and conceptual framework that tries to make it not ... as wrong as it could be.
It could be that we end up with human art as a prestige good (which it already is). That wouldn't be nice, because of power law dynamics of popularity already benefit very few prestige artists. So it could get worse. But could we end up with a Wall-E world where there are no reason for anyone to learn to draw any well? When a kid asks "draw me a rabbit", they won't ask any of the humans around, they ask the machine. The machine can produce a much more prettier rabbit, immediately and tailored to their taste.