I’m sympathetic to the reflexive impulse to defend OpenAI out of a fear that this whole thing results in even worse copyright law.

I, too, think copyright law is already smothering the cultural conversation and we’re potentially only a couple of legislative acts away from having “property of Disney” emblazoned on our eyeballs.

But don’t fall into their trap of seeing everything through the lens of copyright!

We have other laws!

We can attack OpenAI on antitrust, likeness rights, libel, privacy, and labor laws.

Being critical of OpenAI doesn’t have to mean siding with the big IP bosses. Don’t accept that framing.

Not even stealing cheese to run a sandwich shop.

Stealing cheese to melt it all together and run a cheese shop that undercuts the original cheese shops they stole from.

That’s the reason we got copyright, but I don’t think that’s the only reason we could want copyright.

Two good reasons to want copyright:

1. Accurate attribution
2. Faithful reproduction

Accurate attribution:

Open source thrives on the notion that: if there’s a new problem to be solved, and it requires a new way of thinking to solve it, someone will start a project whose goal is not just to build new tools to solve the problem but also to attract other people who want to think about the problem together.

If anyone can take the codebase and pretend to be the original author, that will splinter the conversation and degrade the ability of everyone to find each other and collaborate.

In the past, this was pretty much impossible because you could check a search engine or social media to find the truth. But with enshittification and bots at every turn, that looks less and less guaranteed.

Faithful reproduction:

If I write a book and make some controversial claims, yet it still provokes a lot of interest, people might be inclined to publish slightly different versions to advance their own opinions.

Maybe a version where I seem to be making an abhorrent argument, in an effort to mitigate my influence. Maybe a version where I make an argument that the rogue publisher finds more palatable, to use my popularity to boost their own arguments.

This actually happened during the early days of publishing, by the way! It’s part of the reason we got copyright in the first place.

And again, it seems like this would be impossible to get away with now, buuut… I’m not so sure anymore.

—

Personally:

I favor piracy in the sense that I think everyone has a right to witness culture even if they can’t afford the price of admission.

And I favor remixing because the cultural conversation should be an active read-write two-way street, no just passive consumption.

But I also favor some form of licensing, because I think we have a duty to respect the integrity of the work and the voice of the creator.

I think AI training is very different from piracy. I’ve never downloaded a mega pack of songs and said to my friends “Listen to what I made!” I think anyone who compares OpenAI to pirates (favorably) is unwittingly helping the next set of feudal tech lords build a wall around the entirety of human creativity, and they won’t realize their mistake until the real toll booths open up.

You’re presupposing the superiority of science. What good is knowing the chemical composition of a mind, if such chemicals are but shadows on the cave wall?

You can’t actually witness a rock, in its full objective “rock-ness”. You can only witness yourself perceiving the rock. I call this the Principle of Objective Things in Space.

Admittedly, the study of consciousness is still in its infancy, especially compared to study of the physical world. But it would be foolish to discard the entire concept when it is unavoidably fundamental. Suppose we do invent teleporters and they do erase consciousness. Doesn’t it say something about the peril of worshipping quantification over all else, that we wouldn’t even know until we had already teleported all of our bread? The entire field is babies. I am heavy ideas guy and this is my PoOTiS.

To quote Searle: Should I pinch myself and report the results in the Journal of Philosophy?

The physical world is the hologram.

Between saccades, fnords, and confabulation, I don’t trust a single thing my senses tell me. But the one thing I know for sure is that I’m conscious.

So, knowing that only consciousness is “real”, why would I assume it can be recreated through atoms (which are a mere hallucination)?

From plug-and-play ponytail to plug-and-play pony tail in one step.

A two-state confederation seems good to me. Independent national governance, with bilateral laws for basic things like residency rights across the states and local voting rights based on residency.

As it was with standardized testing, so shall it be with personal behavior: the goal is not to inform the student why, but to enforce compliance.

I haven’t tried it yet, but GrayJay purports to be an aggregator along those lines: https://grayjay.app/

Ms. Pac-Man is the definitive version though.

Splatoon is great if you have Switches.

Helldivers 2 is PvE but is a great group experience.

Extraction shooters might be a thing? Hunt: Showdown?

Aren’t MP3s just a statistical correlation?

Besides, you really don’t need to zoom in on “but muh license agreement” to roast these AI turds.

They’re very clear: We’re gonna put creatives out of work, we’re gonna sell a unified product to replace them, and we’re gonna use their own labor to build their replacements.

That’s anticompetitive.

Nail em on that instead of trying to thread the needle on reining in the tech lords without damaging e.g. linguistic analysis researchers.

We might as well ditch the modern concept of copyright as far as I’m concerned.

Cuz there’s no good outcome to this case if copyright is our only weapon to counter the technofeudalists.

They’re very clear in their aim: Every book a human makes will be used in an effort to replace the human that made the book.

Who gives a shit if that’s through statistics or black magic? It’s anticompetitive behavior, plain and simple. Shoot them down on antitrust grounds.

If doubling the list of rights you sign away in an employment contract is the only way we’re allowed to mitigate this, then we’re fucked.

If you’re looking for a universally-applicable moral framework, join the thousands of years of philosophers striving for the same.

If you’re just looking for an explanation that allows you to put one foot in front of the other…

Laws exist for us to spell out the kind of society we’d like to live in. Generally, we prefer that individuals be able to participate in cultural conversations and offer their own viewpoint. And generally, we prefer that groups of people don’t accumulate massive amounts of power over other groups of people.

Dedicating your life to copying another artist’s style is participating in a cultural conversation, and you won’t be able to help yourself from infusing your own lived experience into your work of copying the artist. If only by the details that you focus on getting exactly right, the slight mistakes that repeat themselves or morph over the course of your career, the pieces you prioritize replicating over and over again. It says something about who you are, and that’s worth appreciating.

Now, if you’re trying to pass those off as originals and not your own tributes, then you’re deceiving people and that’s a problem because you’re damaging the cultural conversation by lying about the elements you’re putting into it. Even so, sometimes that’s an interesting artistic enterprise in itself. Such as when artists pretend to be someone else. Warhol was a fan of this. His whole career revolved around messing with concepts of authenticity in art.

As for power, you don’t gain that much leverage over another artist by simply copying their work. And if you riff on it to upstage them, you’re just inviting them to do the same to you in turn.

But if you can do that mechanically, quickly, so that any creative twist they put out there to undermine your attempts to upstage them, you have an instant response at little cost to yourself, now you’re in a position of great power. The more the original artist produces, the stronger your advantage over them becomes. The more they try, the harder it is for them to win.

We don’t generally like when someone has accumulated tons of power, especially when they subsequently use that power to prevent others from being able to compete.

Edit: I’d also caution against trying to make an objective test for whether a particular act of copying is “okay”. This invites two things:

1. Artists can’t help but question what’s acceptable and play around with it. They will deliberately transgress in order to make a point, and you’ll be forced to admit that your objective test is worthless.

2. Tech companies are relentlessly horny for this kind of objective legal framework, because they want to be able to algorithmically approach the line and fill its border to fractal levels of granularity without technically crossing the line. RealPage, DoorDash, Uber, Amazon, OpenAI all want “illegal” to be as precisely and quantitatively defined as possible, so that they can optimize for “barely legal”.

Crash reporting, probably.

No.

They did issue a fix: “Buy a new CPU please!”

That’s why they don’t mind the reputation hit. If 1 person swears allegiance to Intel as a result but 2 people buy new AMD chips, they’re still ahead. And people will forget eventually. But AMD won’t forget the Q3 2024 sales figures.

I hope this is partly to deal with review bombing, but I also hope it doesn’t completely hide review bombing.

It can be really helpful to know that there is a social media shitstorm around a game.

But sometimes the shitstorm is a bunch of basement dwellers getting mad over nothing, and it makes it hard to see actual opinions about the game.