Programming

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I think of it this way — at some point it surprised me that Microsoft doesn’t claim ownership in some way to the output of Microsoft Word. I think if “word processing” didn’t exist until this point in history there’s no way you’d be able to just write down whatever you want, what if you copied the works of recently-deceased beloved poet Maya Angelou? Think of the estate? I heard people were writing down the lyrics of Taylor Swift’s latest album and printing off hundreds of copies and sharing it with people at her concerts. Someone even tried to sell an entire word-for-word copy of Harry and Megan’s last best seller on Amazon that they claimed they “created” since they retyped it themselves until the publisher shut it down.

Obviously all of those things (except my speculation about them claiming any ownership of the output, but look at OpenAI and their tool) don’t happen, but also I think people can write down their favorite poems if they want or print out lyrics because they want to or sit around typing up fan fiction with copyrighted characters all day long, and then there are rules about what they can sell with that obviously derivative content.

If someone spends forever generating AI Vegetas because Vegeta is super cool or they want to see Vegeta in a bowl of soup or whatever, that’s great. They probably can’t sell that stuff because, y’know, it’s pretty clearly something already existing. But if they spend a lot of time creating new novel stuff, I think there’s a view that (for the end user) the underlying technology has never been their concern. That’s kind of how I see it, but I can understand how others might see it differently.