Is any of that relevant? My point is that copyright was arguably the most radical legal change we ever made around creative markets; a change with wide-reaching implications for people's rights both to automate copying
and around non-automated copying and derivative work. And that change was prompted pretty much entirely just by the automation of a human task that was previously widely accepted to be a natural right.
"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.
