> AI makes copyright and patents obsolete. There are no protections left for original nor derivative works; AI will hoover it all up and reproduce it without qualm and at scale. It must be trained, and it can only be trained on what already exists.

if an AI produces direct plagiarized text from an existing work, that's copyright violation no different from if I simply wrote in my own book someone elses' words without attribution; the copyright holder is entitled to the same legal relief in either case.

if OTOH someone reads a lot of books and then goes off and writes their own book, and the influences of those various books is obvious but they didn't copy any sections verbatim, this is not a copyright issue, a critic might say "wow they really ripped off X and Y, what a terrible, derivative work". But no legal copyright violation, and this is incredibly common, normal, and ordinary, that people make movies/music/books/TV/whatever that is clearly derived from well known works that came before it. Doing the exact same process but also injecting one's own intent into this mixture of "derivation" is actually a feature, not a bug, of artistic creation - creators have to familiarize with the canon of work that came before them in order to produce new work. So if I said, "I want to create a computer program that makes art", of *course* it needs to *look at art*, either via ML training or encoded in the types of algorithms it uses, in order to attempt that.

What people are actually freaking out about is not the creation of cheap derivations, because bad, soulless art has always existed, but the fact that AI's can produce this usually mediocre-to-bad content at tremendous scales for very little money, crowding out human creation. As though there's a planet out there of conscious beings just like us, who have been watching human creation for centuries, and they've created their own creation economy, and one day we or them figure out how to give us humans access to it. Aside from the "we've made contact with extra terrestrial lifeforms" part of it, there'd be similar economic freakouts that humans only want to read books and watch movies made by those amazing alpha centaurian artists who are sending it to us for free.

I think the AI obsoleting copyrights is more of a problem for non-fiction, because nobody is gonna pay the primary source. So it's a big question how will remuneration work in the world where AI is effectively an enclosed commons.