Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)

It certainly is liberating all our creative works from our possession...

Intellectual Property is a questionable idea to begin with...

I'm glad we're seeing the death of the concept of owning an idea. I just hope the people who were relying on owning a slice of the noosphere can find some other way to sustain themselves.

7 years or maybe 14 that's all anybody needs. Anything else is greed and stops human progress.

If we are headed to a star-trek future of luxury communism, there will definitely be growing pains as the things we value become valueless within our current economic system. Even though the book itself is so-so IMO, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom provides a look at a future economy where there is an infinite supply of physical goods so the only economy is that of reputation. People compete for recognition instead of money.

This is all theoretical, I don’t know if I believe that we as humans can overcome our desire to hoard and fight over our possessions.

I appreciate someone named "behringer" posting this sentiment. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behringer#Controversies)

Did we previously have the concept of owning an idea?

Why do you say that?

You're saying something exactly backwards from reality. Star Trek is communism (except it's not) because there's no scarcity. It's not selfishness that's the problem. It's the ever-increasing number of things invented inside capitalism we deem essential once invented.

It's not the loss of ownership I'm lamenting, it's the loss of production by humans in the first place.

Humans will always produce; it's just that those productions may not be financially viable, and may not have an audience. Grim, but also not too far off from the status quo today.

I just wish it was not, as usual, the people with the most money benefiting first and most

People made the same argument about Cameras vs Painting. "Humans are no longer creating the art!"

But I doubt most people would subscribe to that view now and would say Photography is an entirely new art form.

Lawyers and people with lots of money figured out how to make even bigger piles of money for lawyers and people with lots of money from people who could make things like art, music, and literature.

They occasionally allowed the people who actually make things to become wealthy in order to incentivize other people who make things to continue making things, but mostly it's just the people with lots of money (and the lawyers) who make most of the money.

Studios and publishers and platforms somehow convinced everyone that the "service" and "marketing" they provided was worth a vast majority of the revenue creative works created.

This system should be burned to the ground and reset, and any indirect parties should be legally limited to at most 15% of the total revenues generated by a creative work. We're about to see Hollywood quality AI video - the cost of movie studios, music, literature, and images is nominal. There are already creative AI series and ongoing works that beat 90's level visual effects and storyboarding being created and delivered via various platforms for free (although the exposure gets them ad revenue.)

We better figure this stuff out, fast, or it's just going to be endless rentseeking by rich people and drama from luddites.

Copyright law protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves. Favourite case law that reinforces this case was between David Bowie and the Gallagher brothers.

I would argue patents are closer to protecting ideas, and those are alive and well.

I do agree copyright law is terribly outdated but I also feel the pain of the creatives.

If we're abolishing it, we have to really abolish it, both ways, not just abolish companies' responsibilities but not rights, while abolishing individuals' rights but not responsibilities.

It's for sure less questionable than the current proposition of letting a handful of billionaires exploit the effort of millions of workers, without permission and completely disregarding the law, just for the sake of accumulating more power and more billions.

Sure, patent trolls suck, so do MAFIAA, but a world where creators have no means to subsist, where everything you do will be captured by AI corps without your permission, just to be regurgitated into a model for a profit, sucks way way more

How so? Even in a perfectly egalitarian world, where no one had to compete for food or resources, in art, there would still be a competition for attention and time.

> People made the same argument about Cameras vs Painting.

I remember that from a couple of years ago, when Stable Diffusion came out. There was a lot of talk about "art" and "AI" and someone posted a collection of articles / interviews / opinion pieces about this exact same thing - painting vs. cameras.

patents and copyrights allow ownership of ideas and of the specific expression of ideas

There is the general principle of legal apparatus to facilitate artists getting paid. And then there is the reality of our extant system, which retroactively extends copyright terms so corporations who bough corporations who bought corporations... ...who bought the rights to an artistic work a century ago can continue to collect rent on that today. Whatever you think of the idealistic premise, the reality is absurd.

Using generative AI is a lot closer to hiring a photographer and telling them to take pictures for you than taking the pictures themselves.

I mean, you still have the option of taking pictures yourself, if you find that creative and rewarding...

I always say this: we are headed to a star-trek future, but we will not be the Federation, we will become Borg. Between social media platforms, smartphones and "wokeness" the inevitable result is that everybody will be forced into compliance, no originality or divergent thinking will be tolerated.

> Intellectual Property is a questionable idea to begin with...

I know! It's totally and completely immoral to give the little guy rights against the powerful. It infringes in the privileges and advantages of the powerful. It is the Amazons, the Googles, the Facebooks of the world who should capture all the economic value available. Everyone else must be content to be paid in exposure for their creativity.

Absolutely, but it still doesn't make hiring a photographer an art form.

Keeping technology secret or forbidden is as old as humanity itself.

How do you define 'art form'? Anything can arguably be an art form.

Why do we give awards to Directors then?

This is nit-picky but you're probably actually referring to Cinematographers, or Directors of Photography. They're the ones who deal with the actual cameras, lens, use of light, etc. Directors deal with the actors and the script/writer.

The reason we give them awards is that the camera can't tell you which lens will give you the effect you want or how to emphasize certain emotions with light.

A human is still involved with the camera. Just a different set of skills, and absent manipulation in post, the things being photographed tended to actually exist. Now we need neither photographer nor subject.

False equivalency and you know it.

>star-trek future of luxury communism,

Banks' Culture Communism/Anarchism > Star Trek, any day imho.

AIs still aren't autonomous. The model doesn't make anything unless a human directs it to. It's just another layer of abstraction above the camera or paintbrush.

I'm not following how any of the things you mention are "ideas".

That doesn't sound like ownership, though.