> What I’m arguing is that existing legal doctrine on copyright law very clearly does not protect mere ideas or styles.

Like it or not, it is anthropomorphizing to claim that an algorithm can have ideas or use styles, rather than just saying that the apparent "ideas" and "styles" in its output are a mathematical derivation of the human ideas and styles in the copyrighted material in its training set.

If you think people are wasting their time scrolling reels now, the one social benefit is that you might have seen one of the same ones as your (human) friends. Imagine if that was gone. Truly horrifying.

This is exactly the sort of anthropomorphism I'm talking about.

Yes, human artists reproduce styles all the time, but implying this equivalence between what a human does when they recreate a style, and what an AI model has done when its output is suspiciously similar to a single artist's "contributions" to the training set is reductive since the mechanism is obviously completely different. It doesn't say anything about whether one ought to be allowed, just because the other is, but the assumption that it should is doing the legwork for those who benefit from AI as a copyright washing machine.

1. The sheer amount of material on the internet that is "free to view but not free to use for any purpose" is the greatest resource of our time, and despite it being easy for individuals to take advantage of it (no one will take you to court for printing a newspaper comic and pinning it to your corkboard,) it's historically been difficult for corporations to exploit it (their best idea pre-AI is to encourage people to post it on social media walled-gardens where they can surround it with ads.)

2. The reason behind the impressive results of generative AI is because it exploits the above "free" resource, which is the greatest resource of our time. The reason behind the industry-wide push for AI and the insane amount of investment in it, is that they know it's their first real chance to exploit the greatest resource of our time. This is the gold rush.

3. Anthropomorphism is the wool that AI labs are pulling over legislators eyes so they can pull off this heist. If you see training and inference as a black box, a process that consumes a copyrighted work (among others) and produces something very similar to the original work that also competes directly with it, is clearly something that's against the spirit of copyright. But if you (afraid of being judged a luddite) see AI as a little man inside the computer who is "learning" and "creating," how could you deny him? Especially if it would deny your jurisdiction access to the above gold rush. A lot of scientific-sounding AI communication is propaganda for this way of thinking, like the Anthropic J-space stuff, which stops just short of claiming AI is conscious, despite leading the reader to that conclusion.

Selfishly, I think my biggest fear of the AI future is everything will be like this. Previously, the existence of a game like this was proof that a human being was passionate enough to drag it into life. Now, there's this empty and slightly embarrassing feeling where if you think too much about someone else's creation, you might have put more thought into it than they did.

I don't think they'll be forked to irrelevance. Even if I put aside my skepticism of the quality or longevity of AI-assisted projects, I don't think there's a bigger audience for a Nura that's less principled on the issues they mentioned.

That's not the impression I have. HN has almost daily articles bemoaning the use of AI to enhance or pad-out human-to-human communication and the comments almost universally agree that the output is bad, using AI to communicate is rude, and they'd rather read the human-written prompt than the AI-"enhanced" version.

I'm not aware of any model that has solved the AI writing problem. Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 improve on Fable 5 and Opus 5, but neither are good. They all seem to overuse jargon, misuse literary devices and write ill-fitting metaphor. They all produce prose that is dense and hard to read, but sparse on actual information. Even non-techy people can identify AI writing.

Instead we have a TV series that's more or less exactly the same as the old movies.

I chose one over the Apple TV because I knew I wouldn't able to stand any limitations on sideloading. For a while I was running a custom build of Wholphin with patched libmpv/libplacebo to work around a bug before the fix was upstreamed. A device without the freedom to do that sort of thing would drive me nuts.

To be fair, you can have it both ways. If you buy-and-pirate, and you buy 4 UHDs per year or 10 albums per year, you've put more money into the industry than the average streamer. Admittedly, buying-and-pirating isn't as commonly done for movies and TV as it is for music, but that can be explained by the increased DRM and lock-in.

And many pro-AI communities sweep the issue under the rug, consider it invalid in some way, or just over-discussed and boring. They have to, because it's uncomfortable and it has no solution. There is no generative AI without scraped datasets. But the consequence of ignoring the issue is that you might be surprised when you encounter a large group who are still very (justifiably) angry about it. Bluesky has a large community of people who post art for free on the internet.

You can't expect them to be civil either, when so many countries are in a cost of living crisis. No one faces losing their home or health insurance and thinks "I'd better be polite to the people doing it," and a high profile developer posting publicly about implementing a long-asked-for feature with AI is exactly what the AI marketing machine needs. A lot of devs are wondering whether AI-generated code is good or slop, and it's the opinion of other respected devs that sways them.

Also, let's not forget that PDN isn't FOSS. Linux platform knowledge was scraped from FOSS Linux software, trained into AI, and is being used to port a closed source program to Linux where it will displace FOSS alternatives. And the dev expects a pat on the back from the community? Why?