Artificial scarcity in the face of a new efficiency has by-and-large never worked in the long run.
We literally invented an entirely new property right out of thin air just because of the printing press; a human-made right that radically changed almost the entirety of the commercial creative industry and tech industry from that point onward, and radically changed what people are allowed to do today with content that they own, even outside of automated settings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
Do you really want to compare AI to the printing press? For better or worse, the law responded pretty hard to Gutenberg.
Did it promote the betterment of knowledge in any way?
Did it kill Aaron Schwartz?
"It's just more efficient" is not a good argument for deregulation, historically it has often been an argument in the opposite direction.
And I am copyright-skeptical myself. But if your argument for avoiding AI regulation is reliant on convincing people to support copyright abolition, you are not going to convince many people to agree with you. You're basically inviting the space to be regulated; no lawmaker is going to think "this is just like copyright" is an argument against AI regulation. And most ordinary people (even in tech) are not going to agree with you, because most people like that copyright exists. Most people don't look at copyright and think, "this was a mistake."
Looking at the history of the printing press should teach us that the last time somebody made the argument, "we're just doing what humans do, but faster" around creative industries, the law responded, "great point, so we'd better ban humans from doing it too." So just understand the implications of the comparisons you're making; understand that invoking the history of copyright is not a slam-dunk dismissal of artists' concerns.
Yes.
No.
(Yes, it protected independent creators from having their work directly monetized by others, like Disney did.)
(Yes, by providing protections for creators to profit from their own works, it motivated some number of people to write, compose, and create who might otherwise not have done so.)
(No, the government did, using copyright as a pretext.)
Note that points one and two do do not suggest that copyright is useful in its current form, rather than its history 14/28-year form.
