alt Hacker NewsMusicians and writers build new works on top off millennia of literary and musical history, then copyright their works and sell it back to us. Is this so bad? If Taylor Swift, consciously or subconsciously, gets an harmonic idea from a 1970's song and a fragment of a melody from some 1990's song... is that theft?
I'm ambivalent about AI and, like all gold rushes, many of the players are terrible, dishonest, egomaniacal jerks.
But I am deeply skeptical of the idea that aggregation of knowledge and culture is itself wrong. That's literally how culture has worked since the dawn of time, and our modern era obsession with credit and perpetual copyright is unhealthy. \
It's only in the past 100 years or so that this idea of "if you create it, it's yours alone and nobody can build on it without paying you" became current, and it was largely driven by the megacorps that AI haters used to hate (remember the despite for RIAA? I do). It's bizarre to think that someone's life work is entirely their property, as if they grew up in a box and did not build on hundreds of generations of other peoples' lives work.
I don't object to disliking these companies; I object to the idea that you, me, anyone remixing culture is committing a crime. What the hell happened to the hacker ethos?
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I agree with you, but there is one aspect that is different here - the scale that is way beyond what any human can do.
I don't know what to think about that though.
when you do your job you take ideas from others before from university from calculus etc
therefore you have to work for me for free
The problem is not Taylor Swift is being "inspired" from other artists. We have tons of examples this throughout history.
The problem is, replacing Taylor Swift with its AI counterpart, and to use Taylor's own material to do that without getting her permission or compensating her.
This is not about Taylor even. It's about everyone, you and me, and Taylor and Haggard and Blind Guardian and Sia, etc...
We hated RIAA because they prevented us from listening to the music while trying to get it was hard and expensive. In short, we were not angry because they wanted compensation, but because they have cut the supply without giving us a solution. Now we have iTunes Store and Bandcamp for DRM free music, and nobody is against musicians getting their fair share. As a side note, I used to make music, I know what it entails.
Hacker ethos has ethics. It has do experiment but don't cause harm embedded all over it. It's about experiment and discovery. Not about ripping people off for their own profit (unless you're a black hat of course), and getting things were free was part of sending a message, not monetary gain.