So, if we're to establish (I won't say "prove") the idea of [everything is transformation], we'd need to sort out the list of primitives, which are being re-combined.
Conversely, for the [some things are really new], we'd have to find the new items. That said, the new items will almost popup in the context of other transformations, e.g., a new innovation in painting would still likely occur within some more normal transformations.
Take for example the Abstract Art movement, which was about painting not representations of real things, but exploring the elements of form, color, line, texture, but not painting people or landscapes (or only doing so in a very abstract way). So, painting a person on a digital medium vs oil & canvas or watercolor is a transformation. But my sense is that some of these abstract artists were actually digging down into the lower levels of subconscious visual processing, where the initial processing is to find edges, colors, movement, textures, and this was entirely new in the history of painting.
What about concepts, from the flat earth to the round earth, from geocentricism to heliocentrism, to no special location in the universe, or from earth-water-fire-air to alchemy, to structure-of-the-atom-based chemistry? Are there no new ideas here, or are they just out of scope?
To your example, is any number just a combination of other numbers? The concept of Zero didn't exist for a long time in recorded history (how long is debated). What about negative numbers, imaginary numbers? Do we consider these new or combinations?
Or, are we just discussing the Ship of Theseus, a fundamentally unsolvable question that depends on our concept of "new"? (still a fun rabbit hole!)
2. Human mind can recombine all it wants. Itβs called a homage, a reproduction, or a cover. When a software tool does that automated and at scale, though, it is copyright violation.
Was it paid? How do you know? A lot of research is done by Ph.D. students, who are paid if you're lucky. Often though they are in fact paying for a degree.
Moreover, science and art are often held as two sides of the same coin, because they are both fields that don't generate profit, yet society has deemed socially necessary enough to fund them. So even though scientists and artists are held to be opposites personality wise, the roles they play in society are actually very similar. This means their works are also exploited in a similar way.
> Microsoft Designer is not spitting out composites of stolen research, it is creating composites of art that can't be matched back to the original.
We could accurately say that Microsoft is profiting off of research done by students who go uncompensated. If a starving artist should be paid because their drawing went into a diffusion model that Microsoft profits off of, why shouldn't a starving student who wrote a paper that MS read to create their diffusion model be compensated as well?
> Perhaps you should disclose what AI is stealing from you. For me, nothing, because my career is in an area where I don't have to publicly share my work.
Well, that's one of the problems isn't it? Microsoft doesn't have to disclose or attribute any of the works that went into the production of this technology. But in the general case, if you walk through the OpenAI offices, you'll find stacks of research papers, whose authors are listed readily on those papers. If the artists get in on a royalty cut, I don't see why every one of those authors shouldn't as well (and for that matter all the open source devs whose code is running on their systems).
Microsoft Designer is not spitting out composites of stolen research, it is creating composites of art that can't be matched back to the original.
> If artists are being robbed by corporations, then they can get in line if they want a payout, because the rest of us are being robbed too.
Perhaps you should disclose what AI is stealing from you. For me, nothing, because my career is in an area where I don't have to publicly share my work.