I wrote about that back in January
https://wonderwhy-er.medium.com/ai-art-models-and-digital-art-evolution-2223a3757b5d
My expectations back then was that if copyright wins its actually bad for artists. Because large corps like Activision Blizzard, Disney, etc. They own a lot of art. Not artists. If copyright stands for AI then large corps will just roll out their models and have monopoly on them. This is bad...
As it stands AI art is not copyrightable for now. I though that could kill some of momentum for it.
Also what if you take AI product and build on top? How much work should you do on top for it to become copyrightable?
I mean one can use stock images as source to make something and then copyright that and its legit...
But still. AI works not being copyrightable still kills copyrights. I did not understood it from the get go, its a point someone else made. But let's presume AI art is not copyrightable. While human art is. So how does market look like if its swamped by AI arts that is not copyrightable, and is kinda almost free?
Sadly it boils down to nature of copyright itself. What it is, why it exists, is it natural or invented law?
It exists as incentive to give a time limited monopoly to creators to fix natural asymmetry in creativity.
Its hard to make something good, but for some things its way easier to copy something good that was already made. This breaks connection between return on investment. Someone puts in investment to create something, but then it gets copied for fraction of the effort and someone else reaps the returns. This puts disincentive on investing too much in creating good things.
Thus we created unnatural human law of granting that time limited monopoly. But its not for creators. Its for fostering good economy of exchange. So that creators get rewarded for benefits they created. That exchange of value is what copyrights protect.
AI generation throws a wrench in to this arrangement in a weird way. What if creating becomes as easy as copying? Why do you need copyrights then? Law was created for protecting value society and civilisation was getting from it, what should we be protecting now?
