You sound like my coworker 5-10 years ago that told me how I wouldn’t be driving today because of the proliferation of self driving vehicles. I told him he’s a 28 year old dum dum who didn’t understand how things operate in the real world when the constraints aren’t based on technology but on government regulations, the economy, and other factors. I’d say I won that argument for now. I live in the Waymo pilot city and still haven’t taken one mostly due to the limited area they drive in. Just this past week we learned that a traffic can disable a self driving vehicle. I’m interested to see the traffic cone era of AI.
I'm basing this on what US courts have decided. You're free to disagree with them all you'd like, but AI-generated art is not copyrightable. We're seeing an explosion in non-copyrightable art, and when we get down to some small fraction of art being copyrightable, nobody will give a shit about copyright anymore. You also talk about the economy, and guess where the economoc incentives are aligned towards? Hint: it's not towards having expensive humans generate art.
I guess we'll just have to feel that the other is wrong as we wait to see what happens, but I'm betting on existing US regulation and basic human behavior. That's a tall order to bet against.
I agree that copyright is done for in an age of generative models, and as a pirate I'm kind of rooting for it, but i'm not so sure it's unequivocally a Good Thing. I'm interested to understand history better, how art and science was produced and distributed before the legal fiction of intellectual property. the point of allowing someone a monopoly on their work is to share it with the public, same as patents. without the legal framework, the way to protect your work may be to not publish it at all, which is where I see the internet going from here, private enclaves that go to great lengths to prevent LLMs from drinking their milkshake.
I think you're right that it'll be tried, but seems unlikely to work. All it takes is one person in the enclave to leak it, intentionally or accidentally.
