There's zero doubt that people will still create art. Almost no one will be paid to do it though (relative to our current situation where there are already far more unpaid artists than paid ones). We'll lose an immeasurable amount of amazing new art that "would have been" as a result, and in its place we'll get increasingly bland/derivative AI generated content.
Much of the art humans will create entirely for free in whatever spare time they can manage after their regular "for pay" work will be training data for future AI, but it will be extremely hard for humans to find as it will be drowned out by the endless stream of AI generated art that will also be the bulk of what AI finds and learns from.
However the issue is that it will be much harder to make a career in the digital world from an artistic gift and personal style: one's style will not be unique for long as AI will quickly copy it and so make the original much less valuable.
When it's harder to make a career in the digital world (where most of the art is), it's more likely that many artists will never get the opportunity to fully develop their artistic gifts and personal style at all.
If artists are lucky then maybe in a few generations with fewer new creative works being created, AI almost entirely training on AI generated art will mean that the output will only get more generic and simplistic over time. Perhaps some people will eventually pay humans again for art that's better quality and different.
Note that the fashion industry doesn't have copyrights, and runway fashions get copied very quickly. Fashion designers still exist in such a world.
We could also do patronage. Thats how musicians used to be funded. Even today we have grants from public/private institutions.
We could also drift back into "owning the physical media" We see this somewhat with the resurgence of records.
NFTs would have been another way, but at least initially, it failed to become generally accepted into the popular conscious.
Your argument is the same as Facebook saying “we can’t provide this service without invading your privacy” or another company saying “we can’t make this product without using cancerous materials”.
Tough luck, then. You don’t have the right to shit on and harm everyone else just because you’re a greedy asshole who wants all the money and is unwilling to come up with solutions to problems caused by your business model.
It used to be that property rights extended all the way to the sky. This understanding was updated with the advent of the airplane. Would a world where airlines need to negotiate with every land-owner their planes fly above be better than ours? Would commercial flight even be possible in such a world? Also, who is greediest in this scenario, the airline hoping to make a profit, or the land-owners hoping to make a profit?
People who try to prevent models from training on all available data will simply lose to people who don’t, and eventually the maximally-trained models will proliferate. There’s no stopping it.
Assume a world where models proliferate that are trained on all publicly-accessible data. Whatever those models can do for free, humans will have a hard time charging money for.
That’s the sea change. Whoever happens to make money through that sea change is a sub-plot of the sea change, not the cause of it.
If you want to make money in this new environment, you basically have to produce or do things that models cannot. That’s the sink or swim line.
If most people start drowning then governments will be forced to tax whoever isn’t drowning and implement UBI.
Remember the 4 hour work week ? Maybe we are almost there ?
Let’s face it, most people in a developed country have more free time than they know what to do with, mostly spent in HN and social median ofc :)
Tough luck, then. You don’t have the right to shit on and harm everyone else just because you’re a greedy asshole who wants all the money and is unwilling to come up with solutions to problems caused by your business model.
Once the IP is on the internet, you can't complain about a human or a machine learning from it. You made your IP available on the internet. Now, you can't stop humanity benefiting from it.
https://www.legaldive.com/news/Chabon-OpenAI-class-action-co...
Those authors didn’t “make their IP available on the internet”, did they?
What nonsense. Just because doing the right thing is hard, or inconvenient doesn't mean you get to just ignore it. The only way I'd be ok with this is if literally the entire human population were equal shareholders. I suspect you wouldn't be ok with that little bit of communism.
To your last point, I think the best case scenario is open source/weight models win so nobody owns them.
You can bluster and scream and shout "Nonsense" all you want, but that's how it's going to be. Copyright is finished. When good models are illegal or unaffordable, only outlaws -- meaning hostile state-level actors with no allegiance to copyright law -- will have good models.
We might as well start thinking about how the new order is going to unfold, and how it can be shaped to improve all of our lives in the long run.
I think it’s likely that the justice system will deem model training as fair use, provided that the models are not designed to exactly reproduce the training data as output.
I think you hit on an important point though: these models are a giant transfer of wealth from creators to consumers / users. Now anyone can acquire artist-grade art for any purpose, basically for free — that’s a huge boon for the consumer / user.
People all around the world are going to be enriched by these models. Anyone in the world will be able to have access to a tutor in their language who can teach them anything. Again, that is only possible because the models eat ALL the data.
Another important point: original artwork has been made almost completely obsolete by this technology. The deed is done, because even if you push it out 70 years, eventually all of the artwork that these models have been trained on will be public domain. So, 70 years from now (or whatever it is) the cat will be out of the bag AND free of copyright obligations, so 2-3 generations from now it will be impossible to make a living selling artwork. It’s done.
When something becomes obsolete, it’s a dead man walking. It will not survive, even if it may take a while for people to catch up. Like when the vacuum tube computer was invented, that was it for relay computers. Done. And when the transistor was invented, that was it for vacuum tube computers.
It’s just a matter of time before all of today’s data is public domain and the models just do what they do.
…but people still build relay computers for fun:
https://youtu.be/JZyFSrNyhy8?si=8MRNznoNqmAChAqr
So people will still produce artwork.