First of all, character.ai is not a two-sided product/platform.

Second, placing model limits for people who don’t want pay to use a service wouldn’t qualify as enshitification even if this was a two-sided platform.

This is the same scare as when the German cars came, and the Japanese, and the Korean.

Simplifies overview: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UhhZu0ZHdw4

I keep going back to the old-school Disney example because it's easiest to see: Disney did not create Snow White, Bambi, Robin Hood, or Peter Pan. All of those movies are highly influential and core to Disney and the culture of people growing up with them. And they're all fan fiction, or would be considered as such, and be impossible to produce and monetize if Disney had to live with the same copyright restrictions they impose on the rest of us.

If I want to now go and recreate my own movie based on one of the original texts, I think it would be next to impossible since the threat of lawsuit (even if I use none of their IP and would eventually win) would make financing impossible.

Fan fiction has been turned into an edge case by the current copyright system. Putting your own spin on the stories you grew up with used to be the norm.

> my specific concern is for individual artists who hold the rights to their work

To a large degree individual artists do not hold copyright for their work, they often sign it away (especially musicians and authors) in exchange for signing, advances, and distribution.

> what effect do you think abolishment of copyright will have on the production of films that are actually good? Who will finance them when it's impossible to directly monetize them?

I think they will still be financed. Take books, I don't think bookstores will want to vertically integrate from book discovery through printing and retail stores. Consumers will still need ways to identify reputable book publishers to limit what they purchase next.

> I think commodity slop will be the only thing that gets funded anymore

One could argue that this is what has always dominated funding. Most revenue and shows have been for artistically devoid pieces of media (especially in movies).

> No artists are relying on royalties and similar payments for their work.

The 0.00001$ per stream for musicians? Or the 1$ residual checks for reruns?

Disney turning common folk tales (the culture of the day) into movies is not considered fan fiction because there was no monopoly on who could tell those stories, and how.

If lack of copyright for fan fiction and derivative work hasn't stopped good fan fiction authors from doing good work, then I don't think that we will lose much if the newest Marvel movie or franchise reboot also can't be copyrighted.

> I don't think it's a good reason to [partially] abolish copyright except in a very specific and limited scope.

I don't see a good reason for keeping it though. Copyright isn't why artists are being paid pennies for their work.

Even before AI more people tried to be an author/musician than could ever hope to gain even financial success. I don’t think less copyright will dissuade them.

> every author borrows

Borrows yes. But that has changed drastically in the last 100 years because of what has become the copyright system.

I’ll be long dead and gone before people can make and publish their own LOTR, or Star Wars, or whatever franchise they grew up with. Disney would be impossible to start given the current regulations, all those tales would be locked up, and we would all be worse for it.

Lord of the rings will be under copyright til roughly 2050. I think Tolkien's estate has gotten more than enough money from that book and it's time to let other use the word hobbit without the threat of a lawsuit.

If the rewrite is just a stunt and it will crash and burn it will do that whether we spend our free (or work) time writing comments. If there is any hype around this particular topic, it's happening here not in the GitHub repo.

2. Turn into idiomatic rust.

It’s nice to comment, it’s be great to engage with the actual point I made: if the AI write the whole book for you it’s because you asked it to. You can just as well ask it to clean up the prose, or look for inconsistencies, or find flaws in the arguments.