Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

If your doubts are true, why did you have to introduce an analogy?

I feel I have a pretty open view.

And, there's no definition of a 'valid' comment. I'll address points, raise points or whatever. Sorry, I'm not in the realm of 'valid' comments, never was.

Yeah, but it's not a good look when the influence-weighted average of all those people applies double standards for different groups in similar situations. I mean, even when you take just a single person, they're probably going to have a couple conflicting feelings towards any one topic. And yet, if the emergent result of that internal conflict doesn't produce some level of self-consistency in resulting opinions and actions, then something's not quite right.

Like… the entire idea of words like "society", "culture", "zeitgeist", etc. is that they imply a greater level of organization, shared values and ability to act as though one autonomous entity or whatever, than if you merely took "hundreds of millions or billions of" people and dumped them all in one place.

A society or zeitgeist can absolutely have 'hypocrisy'. If it can't, then it's not a culture, just a mass of hominids.

Plus, though it's hard to track, there's probably some degree of hypocrisy aggregated from an individual level too, where people who took one side before are taking the other side now.

I apologize for unknowingly dogpiling on you (there were maybe 3 replies when I made mine). I genuinely wanted to understand your POV on what man made concepts were "real" vs. "fake". I think dividing it into "settled" vs "unsettled" makes a lot more sense. We can argue which concepts are really "settled", but given IP concepts as recent as DMCA it's safe to call software IP unsettled.

>Personally, I'm quite cynical: I think the existing social power structure will win and absorb AI into its IP regime

Yes, that's my fear as well. Which is why I hope these LLVMs get reigned in before it gets out of hand, as it did with DMCA (very rarely used to make sure proper parties are compensated and used just as often to make digital creators kowtow to the whims of the elite).

In your words, I don't see a future where AI wins these cases and the little guy gets to make images of Spiderman without Sony/Marvel/whoever squashing them down. All while probably using that artist's own prompts and existing art to make Spiderman 57.

All materialistic, physical objects and phenomena are real. The physical world is one category of what exists. Think of what would exist if humans were not conscious beings, starting tomorrow. Without any complex thinking or reasoning. Sure, money would exist as the paper it's printed on, and your government would exist as some concrete buildings and some papers in a filing cabinet. That is only what these things are. They are in physical reality nothing more.

The second category of what exists in reality is human souls / consciousness and animal souls / consciousness. Beyond those two categories, there is nothing that exists, unless you enter supernatural territory. Which is not to be discarded, but here we're talking about man-made stuff. We can talk about money, society, ownership of land, and such. But they are always only imagined by people, they themselves can never transcend from the realm of idea and imagination into the realm of the real. Even though we have to relate to these ideas in everyday life because how they control the behaviours of our peers and ourselves, we can never forget that they are not real. But most forget.

In the past and in some regions even today, people held deep beliefs about curses and individual taboos. That a jealous neighbour or romantic rival would curse them, or more likely that a Shaman at their birth informed their family that this person can not eat this or do that, or they would die. And from accounts I've read, people believed this so deeply that they would have convulsions and even die if they broke their taboo by mistake. Just by the power of a false belief. Or the countless who waste their lives believing in some lie about "society". Or people who live under the curses of shame and guilt. And the curse of pride for that matter.

It is much more beneficial and easy on the soul to disregard all and any idea of society and instead deal with people as individuals. Because you're almost always dealing with individuals. And stay away from those who are too deep in the illusion and false belief of "society" or any such thing, because they only know how to bow to those they perceive as higher and kick down on those they perceive as lower.

As humans and individuals, the best thing we can do for ourselves is cleanse our mind from false beliefs. That doesn't mean that we will forget how these ideas work on people, it means we can see them from a higher perspective and that they do not exist. They can be used as pleased, but should never control a superior being.

Agriculture is not a function of society, it's a function of tilling the earth with a plow and sowing seeds. Nothing about it is abstract. I frankly didn't understand that example.

The Bible goes on and on about not having other gods besides God, but it also says that you should not _make_ idols, which I think is a very important and overlooked part. Anything that is undeniably created by humans is a false idol and worshipping it is a mistake. Most people alive right now worship their government, or more accurately their idea of what their government is. Because most do not know how their own government works on paper. Most people would die and kill for their government, while at the same time being nonplussed by other things that should make their blood boil. The slightly smarter ones worship money. One day when they're old, they'll be rich and have their own yacht. If they forgot about their fake money god for a moment, they could go sail the oceans as crew on a yacht while they are young and can enjoy the experience. Can they buy back their youth with some fake money printed in limitless quantities? No, because reality does not bow to the non-real, even if every single person on the planet believed in a falsehood. But a lot of people will have a whole lot of suffering from false beliefs. That's how literal hell on earth is created.

The point AIUI is that it can be whatever we want to define it to be. There is no objective answer to AI vs copyright. Hell, we could invent copyright v2 which applies to AI on days divisible by 4 and v3 on all other days, but only if someone named Bob in Texas wears a beret.

Therefore, people talking about morals or ethics or creativity or human inspiration or whatever are wasting their time on a false premise.