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

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

Why do you say that?

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.

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

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.