In what way does anyone have a monopoly on generated images and video? Last I checked there were several major players and more startups than you can shake a stick at.

Not monopoly but oligopoly. Only a small # of entities have enough resources to train the models on tens of 1000s of GPUs.

Does that matter when the models they generate are given away for free?

You can make your argument validly against DALL•E or Midjourney families, but we've also got the Stable Diffusion family of models that anyone can just grab a copy of.

It won’t last. There’s a massive incentive to build more GPUs and develop specialized chips and everyone who can is scrambling to meet that demand. The technology is not some trade secret that no one can copy which is why there are so many people and companies diving into this market now. Hardware is a bit slow to ramp up production of but it will get there eventually because there’s money to be made.

I’m talking about generative ai VS human artists. But in this case it seems like OpenAI specifically has a massive leap over everyone else with this video generation. So whether they have a monopoly over that remains to be seen.

What does not remain to be seen though is that generative ai is going to put a lot of artists out of work.

You can argue about the good and bad of that but it’s defo happening.

So at what point is a painter too effective to be legal? Should we limit the amount of paintings that a single painter is allowed to produce per month?

Not sure if you’re just being facetious but my point is that individual painters do not need to have limits on them because they have a natural human limit that stops them causing societal problems.

What if da Vinci had been superhuman and could take on 1,000,000 commissions per day and had also taught himself every style of art and would do each commission for 0.001x the cost of anyone else.

Yes society as a whole benefit from a fantastic amount of super high quality art.

But the other artists are not gonna be so happy with the situation are they?

Sincerely — who cares?

There isn’t a human right to make money from art.

People make decisions based on what society deems valuable. That changes over time and has for the entirety of human history.

Maybe there’s a demand for more customized art. Maybe spite patronage will make a comeback.

Anyone telling you they know how it will shake out is a fraud. But the incentives we’ve set up have a natural push and pull to get people to do what society values.

It's funny all you guys arguing there isn't a right/law to make money from art. What do you think copyright is? The issue is that all these models were trained in blatant violation of copyright. And before you say they just take inspiration, that's the same argument as saying when I copy a movie to my harddrive it's the same remembering. It's not and a computer is not a human.

Hey, don't look at me, I voted Pirates. - So yeah, I am skeptical of copyright too, and for the same reason.