Etsy stopped caring a while ago, it was supposed to be a marketplace specifically for selling handmade items but they allowed it to be overrun with mass produced tat dropshipped direct from the factory. Turning a blind eye to plagiarism with or without AI is just the next logical step from there.

> Why does Etsy allowed clearly reproduced/copied works

They don't, in that they'll ban you for it once you're big enough

A motivated legislature with skilled enforcement personnel could get the toothpaste back in the tube in short order provided they displayed an anomalous insensitivity to making the money sad.

There are two major differences between art generators and human artists:

1) human artists are legal persons and capable of being held liable in civil court for copyright infringement; having a machine with no legal standing do the copyright infringement should be forbidden because it is difficult to detect, impossible to avoid, and a legal nightmare to unravel.

2) human artists are capable of understanding what flowers, Jesus on the cross, waterfalls, etc actually are, whereas DALL-E is much dumber than a lizard and not capable of understanding these things, so using the verb "learning" to describe both is extremely misleading. DALL-E is a statistical process which is barely more sophisticated than linear regression compared to a human brain. It is plain wrong to say stuff like this:

> It seems like they are deeply upset someone has figured out a way for a machine to do what artists have been doing since time immemorial.

when nobody has even come close to figuring that out! If DALL-E worked like a human artist it would know what a bicycle is: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... But it doesn't. It is a plagiarism machine that knows how to match "bicycle" with millions images having a "bicycle" tag, and uses statistics to smooth things together.

Llms are not humans and shouldn’t be anthropomorphized as a strategy to get around copyright infringement.

My mom said the teachers in her painting classes would have the students recreate works and were very clear on which artists had given permission for those derivative works to be sold. Others they could only admire at home.

The problem is not "when learning", the problem is "when distributing". Courts will determine whether or not disseminating or giving access to a model trained on protected works counts as distributing protected derivative works or not.

This analogy seems to be made every time this comes up on HN, but I don't think it really holds water. First of all, when a human artist learns from another, it's inherently a level playing field for competition; the junior and senior are both human, neither are going to be 1,000,000x more productive as the other. So the senior artist really doesn't have that much to worry about. And the senior artist recognizes that they themselves were once a junior and had to learn from their seniors, so it's a debt paid forward which results in more art. And becoming a master artist or even an imitator takes dedication and hard work, even with lots of artwork to learn from, so that keeps competition to a certain level.

When it takes decades to develop an art style that a machine can copy in days, and then churn out derivative variations in seconds, it's no longer a level playing field. The machine can dramatically under-cut the artist who developed their style, much more than a copycat human artist could. This does become not just a threat to the livelihoods of artists, but also a disincentive to the development of new art styles.

In this case, patent law may be an apt comparison for the world we're entering. Patent law was developed with the idea in mind that it is a problem if a human competitor could simply take an invention, learn how it works, and then mass produce copies of it. There are several reasons for this, including creating an incentive for technology development, and also expediently transitioning IP to the public domain. But patents were added to the legal system basically because otherwise an inventor would not be on a level playing field with the competition, because it takes so many more resources to develop a new invention than to produce clones.

Existing IP law was built in a world where it was believed that machines were inherently incapable of learning and mass-producing new artistic works using styles learned from artists. It was not necessary to protect artists from junior artists learning how to work in their style, as long as it wasn't a forgery. But in a world of machine learning, perhaps we will decide it's reasonable to protect artists from machine copycats, just like we decided it was reasonable protect technology inventors from human copycats.

The patent system is not the right implementation; it's expensive to file a patent, and you need skilled lawyers to determine novelty, infringement, and so on. But for art and machine learning, it might be much simpler: a mandatory compensation for artists' work used as training data. Something like this is sometimes used in the music industry to determine royalties for radio broadcasting, or to account for copies spread by file sharing.

When a human does it, it's fine.

When OpenAI's servers do it its copyright infringement.

We don't apply copyrights to human brains, but we do apply copyright to computer memory.

I dont know why you are getting downvotes, you are absolutely correct.

A training method for some authors who want to adopt an older artists voice is to literally rewrite their novels. Word for word. They will go through an entire authors catalogue and reproduce them, so that they can learn to mimic them when creating something new.

You go ahead and automate the process, and suddenly the world is ending.

Ditto all other kinds of art. Heck I knew of 3 living artists doing this to each other in real time.