Speaking as a creative who also has gotten paid for creative work, I'm a bit flustered at how brazenly people just wax poetic about the need for copyright law, especially when the creator or artist them selves are never really considered in the first place.
It's not like yee olde piracy, which can even be ethical (like videogames being unpublished and almost erased from history), but a new form whereby small companies get to join large publishers in screwing over the standalone creator - except this time it isn't by way of predatory contracts, but by sidestepping the creator and farming data from the creator to recreate the same style and form, which could've taken years - even decades to develop.
There's also this idea that "all work is derivative anyways, nothing is original", but that sidesteps the points of having worked to form a style over nigh decades and making a living off it when someone can just come along and undo all that with a press of a button.
If you're libertarian and anarchist, be honest about that. Seems like there are a ton of tech bros who are libertarian and subversive about it to feel smort (the GPL is important btw). But at the end of the day the hidden agenda is clear: someone wants to benifit from somebody else's work without paying them and find the mental and emotional justification to do so. This is bad, because they then justify taking food out of somebody's mouth, which is par for the course in the current economic system.
It's just more proof in the pudding that the capitalist system doesn't work and will always screw the labourer in some way. It's quite possible that only the most famous of artists will be making money directly off their work in the future, similarly to musicians.
As an aside, Jay-Z and Taylor Swift complaining about not getting enough money from Spotify is tone-deaf, because they know they get the bulk of that money anyways, even the money of some account that only plays the same small bands all the time, because of the payout model of Spotify. So the big ones will always, always be more "legitimate" than small artists and in that case they've probably already paid writers and such, but maybe not.. looking at you, Jay-Z.
If the copyright cases get overwritten by the letigous lot known as corporate lawyers and they manage to finger holes into legislation that benifits both IP farmers and corporate interests, by way of models that train AI to be "far enough" away from the source material, we might see a lot of people loose their livelihoods.
Make it make sense, Beehaw =(
That kind of legislation will come late, and won't change a thing.
Best we can do, is to realize the effects are only harmful if we insist on running faster and faster trying to outcompete the AIs. Nobody can outrun an AI, definitely not the ones that will be running on hardware from 5-10 years from now (expect memristor based neural net accelerators that will leave current GPU based solutions in the dust), and nobody will stop random people from using them for everything once the box has already been opened (just pray the first use won't be for war).
Fight for legislation that will stop requiring to run in the job rat maze to survive in the first place, to have a fighting chance; the alternative is a lot of suffering for everyone.
Here, here. Or is it hear, hear? Either way I completely agree, though I very much doubt we'll see something like that in our lifetime. Still worth fighting for though!
This could be a start:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income
It's an old idea, already successfully tested in some places, in some more thanks to COVID, and just needs more general awareness and support... which I think the incoming AI transition might give it.
Would be nice to have it in place before it becomes widely needed, but we'll see how it goes.
I like UBI as a concept, but my immediate next thought is what happens if we don't simultaneously get rid of profit-driven corporations. Now we're post-scarcity and there's no more (compensated) human labor, but corporations are still in control and... well, there's no labor to strike, and the economy won't collapse anymore even if everyone starts rioting. Isn't there a danger of ossifying the power structures which currently exist?
Rather the opposite.
With an UBI guaranteeing base needs, nobody needs to strike or riot... if they don't like how things are being managed, they can spend their time on creating their own corporation, some of which will perform better than the established ones and eat them alive... which is not even a problem for the previous corporation owners: worst case scenario, they'd fall back to an UBI level.
It would promote a much higher "class mobility", with the bottom class being "oh well, all base needs guaranteed", and the top class being "no limit", accessible to anyone with the skills, a real meritocracy. All the time allowing people who don't care about any of that, to pursue their own goals in life and let others play the corporation games.
There is also an argument that corporations structured around members voting on their decisions, could attract more members and get a much larger mass to overthrow older less efficient corporations. Or any other structure; it would become a real playfield for experimenting and optimizing corporate/political structures to optimize their performance, with no risk of anyone going bankrupt and falling below the UBI level.