>It took a truly colossal amount of human time and effort to build AI systems. It takes significant amount of energy to run those AI systems.

Those people and effort aren't at all tied to the people who are making and using the art.

In the past every individual person would have to individually study art and some style and practice for years of their life to be able to replicate it really well. And for each piece of artwork it could take them days to make 1 single piece.

I would argue that this is why it wasn't really problematic to copy someone's work or style. Because the individual time and effort per person to even do that was so high.

But now that time and effort for an individual is next to nothing.

I do wonder what the outcome would be for a model trained only on truly non copyright work, and derivatives from there. I'm no AI expert, but from what I understand they use some models to generate data with which to train further models. I'd be interested in the output, whether it would eventually just match what we have now anyway, so the copyright question may end up moot. I wonder how the argument would shift at that point?

I think in reality, it is probably too late for that, because the internet is now polluted with AI generated images which would be consumed by any "ethical" model anyway.

I expect it would require significantly more human labor to train (ie no longer fully unsupervised). I imagine that this constraint would lead to significant additional research to improve the efficiency of the training process, and that novel approaches would be developed.

In other words I think it would suck up a lot of money over a few years and then we would arrive back pretty much where we are now.

You don't see a difference between a person spending years learning techniques to create art by hand, and spending months or years studying and practicing some famous artists style, and then spending days manually crafting drawing a single piece of artwork in the style and quality of the originals.

The difference between that, and a person just entering a prompt to create some drawing in some style.

The model looked at orders of magnitude more examples of artwork than a single human could look at and study in a lifetime.

To me there is a clear difference here.

I am merely saying that perhaps the rules should change due to the drastic change in time and effort required to do the work.

Therefore we should give up all heavy equipment and all ditches should be dug with a spoon.

Sometimes technology changes and what was nearly impossible in the past becomes trivial.

Nobody is arguing that…

Nobody is saying let’s not have these new efficient tools. All people are saying is let’s make protections and considerations etc for the original artists and their work that’s being used for training and for when the model draws from it to replicate the style that they developed.

The rules do change, but as a meritocracy as society simply decides to move on or not. There will be no cabal of artists who define how the rules will change. It will be organic. Like moving on from cave paintings to impressionism.

> I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images.

The word "meaningful" here is a cheap hedging maneuver, and if you don't see a meaningful difference (whatever that means), that's on you.