None of the above. Every professional in the world, including me, owes our careers to looking at examples of other people’s work and incorporating those ideas into our own work without paying a penny for it. Freely copying and imitating what we saw around us has been the norm for thousands of years - in a process known as “the spread of civilization” - until relatively recently, when it was demonized (for business reasons, not moral ones) by people who got rich selling copies of other people’s work and paying them a pittance for the privilege, known as a “royalty”. That little piece of bait on the hook convinced our whole culture to put a black hat on behavior that had been standard for millennia. If angry modern enlightened justice warriors want to treat a business concept into a moral principle and rant about it, that’s fine with me, but I’m more of a traditionalist.
Comment on Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not
Thistlewick@lemmynsfw.com 1 day agoYou’re right, each of the 5 million books’ authors should agree to less payment for their work, to make the poor criminals feel better.
If I steal $100 from a thousand people and spend it all on hookers and blow, do I get out of paying that back because I don’t have the funds? Should the victims agree to get $20 back instead because that’s more within my budget?
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Thistlewick@lemmynsfw.com 1 hour ago
Nobody who is mad at this situation thinks that taking inspiration, riffing on, or referencing other people’s work is the problem when a human being does it. When a person writes, there is intention behind it.
The issue is when a business, owned by those people you think ‘demonised’ inspiration, take the works of authors and mulch them into something they lovingly named “The Pile”, in order to create derivative slop off the backs of creatives.
When you, as a “professional”, ask AI to write you a novel, who is being inspired? Who is making the connections between themes? Who is carefully crafting the text to pay loving reference to another authors work? Not you. Not the algorithm that is guessing what word to shit out next based on math.
These businesses have tricked you into thinking that what they are doing is noble.
Womble@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
You think that 150,000 dollars, or roughly 180 weeks of full time pretax wages at 15$ an hour, is a reasonable fine for making a copy of one book which doe no material harm to the copyright holder?
Thistlewick@lemmynsfw.com 2 hours ago
No I don’t, but we’re not talking about a single copy of one book, and it is grovellingly insidious to imply that we are.
We are talking about a company taking the work of an author, of thousands of authors, and using it as the backbone of a machine that’s goal is to make those authors obsolete.
When the people who own the slop-machine are making millions of dollars off the back of stolen works, they can very much afford to pay those authors. If you can’t afford to run your business without STEALING, then your business is a pile of flaming shit that deserves to fail.