clarkmoody

Don't forget all the entrenched interests, both inside and outside government, that benefit from the status quo and are willing to fight to maintain it.

Many of the great artists also produced art that fit right in with the zeitgeist. Impressionists, realists, surrealists, etc. Classic rock songs as variations on a theme. There were very few pioneers of each new style and hundreds of inspired (copycat) artists. Do we discount their art as well? Certainly not!

Just go look at $_SECTION in your local bookstore. Most of the books have covers that fit right in with all the other covers on the shelf.

So my question is whether a computer doing the same thing is a difference in degree only, or in kind? But I think most people with strong opinions (and itchy downvote fingers) are coming at this from a moral outrage perspective (massive theft of IP / disregard for humans).

It might have been the Exponent podcast years ago that was talking about how a set of contracts, practices, and (maybe) laws should be drawn up to cover that exact face-scan-the-actor use case, but enable royalties to go back to the actor. So then Shaq could appear in so many more commercials (lol)

So you agree with the quoted line from the article, that LLM training is predicated on large-scale theft?

> all of the AI models that are being used to replace artists were trained through the mass theft of those very same artists’ work

This seems to be the underlying moral justification for creatives' opposition of AI. Job destruction is the obvious self-interested justification.

My question (probably not original) is this: which biological neural network was not trained on copyrighted material from other artists? Which guitarist never listened to classic rock bands? Which painter never looked at Monet? Nearly all successful artists publicly recognize the influence of prior art on their development and style (and the rest are lying).

A quick hypothetical:

Let's say instead of hoovering up billions of images from data dumps, the AI researchers took a still camera to all the art galleries on the planet and snapped photos of art, then trained the neural network on those photos. Is this still "theft" of the artists' work? What about if an embodied AI in a robot chassis did the same, then painted new art with oil & canvas? Is this still theft?

Perhaps this example fails because it's not enough data? But is it a difference in degree or a difference in kind?

How many laws does the federal government have?

> The Library of Congress has said trying to count them is nearly impossible.

Subjects, not citizens.

Nearly impossible to actually buy A4 paper in the US

To be fair to yourself, a16z could have changed over that time, and the marketing was honest early on.

> To translate such figures into comparable 2026 magnitudes, multiply by a factor of 1,200.

Perhaps this has something to do with the economic dislocations and world wars between the 1870s and today?

Don't forget that the incumbents will fight to keep regulatory barriers high.

The collapse of the government does not imply the collapse of civil society.