I’m out and about today, so apologies if my responses don’t contain the level of detail I’d like; As for the law being collective morality, all sorts of religious prohibitions and moral scares HAVE ended up in the law. The idea is that the “collective” is large enough to dispel any niche restrictive beliefs. Whether or not you agree with that strategy aside, that is how I believe the current system works in an ideal sense (even if it works differently in practice), that’s what it is designed to protect from my perspective.

As for anti-AI artists, let me pose a situation for you to illustrate my perspective. As a prerequisite for this situation, a large part of a lawsuit, and the ability to advocate for a law is based on standing, the idea that you personally, or a group you represent has been directly, tangibly harmed by the thing you are trying to restrict. Here is the situation:

I am a furry, and a LARGE part of the fandom is based on art and artists. A core furry experience is getting art commissioned of your character from other artists. It’s commonplace for all these artists to have a very specific, identifiable signature style, so much so that it is trivial for me and other furs to be able to identify artists by their work alone at just a glance. Many of these artists have shifted to making their living full time off of creating art. With the advent of some new generational models, it is now possible to train a model exclusively off of one singular artists style, and generate art indistinguishable from the real thing without ever contacting them. This puts their livelihood directly at risk, and also muddies the waters in terms of subject matter, and what they support. Without laws regulating training, this could take away their livelihood, or even give a (very convincing, and hard to disprove) impression that they support things they don’t, like making art involving political parties, or illegal activities, which I have seen happen already. This almost approaches defamation in my opinion.

One argument you could make is that this is similar to the invention of photography, which may have directly threatened the work of painters. And while there are some comparisons you could draw from that situation, photography didn’t fundamentally replace their work verbatim, it merely provided an alternative that filled a similar role. This situation is distinct because in many cases, it’s not possible, or at least immediately apparent which pieces are authentic, or not. That is a VERY large problem the law needs to solve as soon as possible.

Further, I believe the same, or similar problems exist in LLMs, like they do in the situation involving generative image models above. Sure with enough training, those issues are lessened in impact, but where is the line of what is ok and what isn’t? Ultimately the models themselves don’t contain any copyrighted content, but they (by design) combine related ideas and patterns found in the training data, in a way that will always approximate it, depending on the depth of training data. While “overfitting” might be considered a negative in the industry, it’s still a possibility, and until there is some sort of regulations establishing the fitness of commercially available LLMs, I can envision situations in which management would cut training short once it’s “good enough”, leaving overfitting issues in place.

Lastly, with respect, I’d like to push back on both the notion that I’d like to ban AI or LLMs, as well as the notion that I’m not educated enough on the subject to adequately debate regulations on it. Both are untrue. I’m very much in favor of developing the technology, and exploring all it’s applications. It’s revolutionary, and worthy of the research attention it’s getting. I work on a variety of models across the AI and LLM space professionally, and I’ve seen how versatile it is; That said, I have also seen how over publicized it is. We’re clearly (from my perspective) in a bubble that will eventually pop. We’re claiming products use AI to do this and that across nearly every industry, and while LLMs in particular are amazing, and can be used in a ton of applications, it’s certainly not all of them— and I’m particularly cautious of putting new models in charge of dangerous or risky processes where they shouldn’t be before we develop adequate metrics, regulation, and guardrails. To summarize my position, I’m very excited to work towards developing them further, but I want to publicly express the notion that it’s not a silver bullet, and we need to develop legal frameworks for protecting people now, rather than later.