This argument implies that AI scientists have replicated the human mind. Despite the hype, they have not. The two processes are not the same, nor is the nature of the "training data" both entities have been trained on.
> This argument implies that AI scientists have replicated the human mind.
No, MightyBuzzard was not necessarily making an argument about the way the human mind is. Suppose that an AI model is prompted to make an image in X artist's style, and a human is commissioned to make an image in the same X artist's style. The result from the AI model cannot be ex-ante assumed to be more of a reproduction of X artist's actual works than is the result from the human. What matters first is the actual similarity of the new works to one or more old works. The method of creation of the new work comes second. If the style of the new work is similar to the style of the old work but the new work is not actually substantially similar to any of the old works, then the method of creation doesn't matter.
From an article about the substantial similarity test in the US [1]:
> To win a claim of copyright infringement in civil or criminal court, a plaintiff must show he or she owns a valid copyright, the defendant actually copied the work, and the level of copying amounts to misappropriation.[1][3]
The key phrase is "the work". An actual work, not a style.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity#Substan...
It couldn't possibly be that there's a more nuanced position in the middle, where people are justifiably angry at IP laws being abused by big companies to abuse and disenfranchise smaller creators, but are also justifiably angry at generative ML projects (run by big companies) hoovering up everyone's work in order to profit off reproducing it ad infinitum—thus abusing and disenfranchising smaller creators.
No, it must be that people are just that fickle.