I suspect that your extreme position must come with a sincere belief that nothing even close to human intelligence will ever be achieved. Imagine a robot with an AI brain. It would have to be blindfolded because just by learning to recognize, or even just viewing, the label on a can of Coke it would have “copied” it and become “illegal,” especially if it was capable of sketching it on demand. Any kind of intelligence cannot even simply view or listen to the world without encountering something IP-encumbered.

Learning, by human or machine, means extracting a copy of the essence of something and yes, storing that essence in a lossy way. It seems like learning from copyright-encumbered material ought to either be illegal for both, or legal. I know which world I would rather live in.

>Where generative AI ingests copyrighted works in order to work and bases its output on it, then it is copyright infringement

This is an absurd standard. Is it copyright infringement when a human "ingests" copyrighted work and bases their output on it? Because that's commonly called inspiration and is how every artist creates their work - through experiencing other works and using that cumulative inspiration to form their own product.

Copyright infringement is already ridiculously restrictive as it is, this proposal not only fundamentally misunderstands how generative AI works but penalises AI for doing what humans do everyday.

Yes, but I believe there are two questions here:

* Does the model itself violate copyright? * Does the output of the model violate copyright?

I don't know how you could make an argument that the ingestion of information into a model through a training procedure in order to create something that can generate truly unique outputs isn't transformative of the original works. The legal standard for a new work to be considered a copyright violation of an original work is "substantial similarity". I don't know how you can make an argument that a generative model is "substantially similar" to thousands of original works...

Honestly, I'm not even sure if "fair use" comes into play for the model itself. In order for fair use to come into play, the model has to be deemed to be violating some copyright. Only once it is found to be violating does "fair use" come into play in order to figure out if it is illegal or not.

The second question is the one where fair use is likely to come into play more. And this question has to be asked of each output. The model's legality only becomes an issue here if, like Napster, you can't argue that the model has much point other than violating copyright. Napster didn't violate copyright (the code for Napster wasn't infringing on anything), but it enabled the violation of copyright and didn't have much point other than that.

I don't think you can make that argument though. I use ChatGPT most days, and I've never gotten copyrighted material out of it. I could ask it to write me some Disney fan fiction, which would violate a copyright. And I think there is a valid legal question here about who is responsible for preventing me from doing that. This is where I think the gray area is.