That’s a bizarre definition.

So because they’re both black boxes we suddenly treat them both the same legally?

I don’t have to prove that an ML transform is equivalent to a human being. Divine spark isn’t necessary to protect you from copyright - we have laws that determine what you need to do and those laws have allowed IP to exist as a profitable area for a century.

Here’s a simple question - if I were to take an image from an artist on artstation and announce my for money Warhammer tournament with it, without paying him, I’d be violating his IP rights.

But if I build an ML engine I apparently can take 100 of his images, produce similar images and charge money for it. Magic!

Explain to me - how did the artist suddenly lose his IP rights exactly ?

I submit it is up to ML researchers to prove this isn’t the biggest IP land grab in history. Not for me to prove that somehow humans are different. We know humans are different and we’ve codified in law just how much new IP needs to be different in order to avoid copyright. That’s good enough for humans.

But somehow ML enthusiasts want to say that if I feed an ML all the Disney movies and I get it to make it derivative work, it’s somehow protected? I can’t wait to see all the Mickey Mouse movies made by AÍ. Guess what - that’s never going to happen. If you think Disney or any other IP empire will let that go, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s absolute madness to say that anything that goes into an ML transformation is uncopyrightable. Or somehow I have no rights over my artwork because I don’t have the ability to sue OpenAI to oblivion like Disney does? Because that’s literally what we’re saying - those artists from artstation and Getty whose images were used were used exactly because they believed that they wouldn’t be able to sue - thanks to distinctions like your own!

Disney won’t let that stand, they would sue and push for annihilation, but hey the 100,000 artists on artstation? F** them, they can’t sue us. Let’s use their shit.

That’s basically where we’re at.

Let’s work out an example.
So this AI can be feed all of Lucien Freud’s works. Then it can produce Lucien Freud-like artwork. And in this process, where all that is missing is Lucien Freud’s own signature, it could potentially make a virtual replica of one of his most famous paintings! Thus I would have a copy of Lucien Freud! But completely copyright free.

Are you for real? This cannot, absolutely cannot be allowed to happen. It is the biggest data theft in history, larger than Facebook or anything, to basically say that any human data when run through an ML transformation engine is no longer property of the human being who produced it but if the ML engineer. This is absolute madness if you consider the second order and third order effects.

Essentially all human data that can be automated through ML would be automated to the gain of only the ML engineers involved. The intellectual property of millions of human beings producing the data would be nothing but compost. This will lead to an unsustainable situation, where no one but ML engineers will be able to make any profit in the world. Human beings must be compensated for their data, or we’re headed straight into a dystopia.