I just don't understand people saying "but a human learning from a book isn't illegal".

How do people not understand that some laws only make sense at a certain scale? One human learning from resources and being added to the labour pool is not the same as an infinitely copyable entity doing the same thing. One has negligible impact on the demand for the original, and the other replaces 99% of the demand."

And creating a rule that says you cannot train on any material unless the rights holder authorises it via license is not complicated. That will creat a amrketplace where creators can decide the price for their content. It's just inconvenient.

Because it’s a bad faith argument that presupposes integrating someone else’s work into your algorithm is equivalent to me reading a book.

Your rule would be the right way to do all this. You could even have a mechanical royalty that applies by default where you can train on anything that hasn’t set rules and a preset rate.

I agree that there is not an orange to orange comparison, but I have still not seen a law that could scale as well. The example that comes to mind with a proposed law like this is how would you license work that build on another work? What if I decide to publish a blog post after taking some course, that distills whatever I learned in the course for free?

Because copyright is a tradeoff. Society wants information to be free. But authors won’t publish if anyone can republish their work for free. Hence the distinction: The ideas you write are not protected - only your expression is.

In a sense, AI changes nothing. Society profits from having AI just as it profits from having people learning from others. In both cases, those who stand on the shoulders of others still make money for themselves. But the economy as a file is richer, too, because people can choose to buy something better now that wasn’t available before.

This is a similar problem with data brokers. They take public data laws to an extreme and resell easy access to the aggregated data. This easy access has created a tremendous number of problems unforeseen by the original intent of the access.

Public access to data used to mean "you make a request, wait a bit, maybe pay a small fee, and sometimes physically show up to city hall." The barriers meant that you had to make a job out of collecting a significant chain of data and most people wouldn't bother unless they really needed it.

Now it means pay some fee to a third party and get every piece of public data about a person instantly. You can get data from thousands of sources and subscribe to it.

I would argue artists imitating, for example, the artists who revolutionize a genre of music are also in fact massively reducing the demand for the originals by 99%. Imagine if no one ever made a song after the Beetles that sounded any newer. The demand for Beetles music would have remained somehow even more enormous than it was for the last 50 years. Or if no one did abstract paintings after Kandinsky, or impressionism after Monet or cubism after Picasso.