Re:Basilisk II Macintosh 68K emulator ported to iPadOS
by ben_w on Sunday October 09, 2022 @05:33AM
(#33139391)
I suspect that AI generated content is (eventually, not the current versions) going to destroy copyright as a concept.
The generally-stated reason for copyright is to incentivise the creation of more works, but when those works can be made for less than the cost of the food needed to feed a human for long enough to ask a machine to make it[0], the economic value disappears and only tradition remains.
However, that's assuming it's purely economics; if art is humanity's version of peacock tails, then the effort is the point, and even an uploaded brain will be dismissed as "not capable of real art".
[0] I don't know how much power a genuinely human level creative AI would consume, but let's compare one of the current image generators:
For the human, 10 seconds to type in a prompt * minimum cost of keeping a human alive ($1.90 abject poverty threshold) = $0.00022
For the AI, maximum power draw of Mac mini M1 * 90 seconds to create an image = 3,510 joules; at $0.1/kWh[1] that's $0.0001
The cost of the AI doing the thing is about half the minimum possible cost of getting a human to ask the AI to do the thing.
The generally-stated reason for copyright is to incentivise the creation of more works, but when those works can be made for less than the cost of the food needed to feed a human for long enough to ask a machine to make it[0], the economic value disappears and only tradition remains.
However, that's assuming it's purely economics; if art is humanity's version of peacock tails, then the effort is the point, and even an uploaded brain will be dismissed as "not capable of real art".
[0] I don't know how much power a genuinely human level creative AI would consume, but let's compare one of the current image generators:
For the human, 10 seconds to type in a prompt * minimum cost of keeping a human alive ($1.90 abject poverty threshold) = $0.00022
For the AI, maximum power draw of Mac mini M1 * 90 seconds to create an image = 3,510 joules; at $0.1/kWh[1] that's $0.0001
The cost of the AI doing the thing is about half the minimum possible cost of getting a human to ask the AI to do the thing.
[1] Close enough: https://www.energybot.com/electricity-rates-by-state.html