Item — HN Reader

> Turns out a lot of people's creativity is limited to what someone else has already made.

This describes the vast majority of creative works and is therefore a significant part of how we define creativity to begin with. Very few people are capable of turning their lived experiences into art without prior examples. Any character anyone creates is copyrighted by default, does this mean we should ban people from creating derivatives of anything?

The existing norms around intellectual property are broken. They benefit the instrumental bean counters more than passionate creators. We need copyleft, not copyright.

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> Turns out a lot of people's creativity is limited to what someone else has already made.

It's how Disney got started. Then pulled up the ladder behind them by lobbying for ever longer copyright.

But even with IP norms, today’s AI is still stricter than what’s technically allowed.

People can legally make derivatives of IP which are very similar; case in point, Palworld (which admittedly is being sued, but only for minor details, and since the original IP is one of the strongest defended, this means that the bigger similarities have practically been deemed legal). The problem is that today’s LLMs (and diffusion models) are easy to trick, so in order to restrict them from creating derivatives that are too similar (to the point of copyright infringement), the AI companies add overly-strict guardrails. Ironically, these guardrails still tend to be bypassed by dedicated individuals, leading to even stricter guardrails that are still ineffective; and this has been an issue since the early days of ChatGPT.

When Steve Jobs died, many people posting "in memoriam" of him used that B&W photo (you know which one). I found it quite interesting how Apple users are supposedly creative types, but they just copied that photo...