Everything is a remix of a copy of derivative works. They learn from other people, from other artists, from institutions that teach entire industries. Some of it had “informed consent”, some of it was “borrowed” from other ideas without anybody’s permission. We see legal battles on a monthly basis as to whether these four notes are too similar to these other four notes. Half of the movies are reboots, and some of them were actually itself another reboot a few times over.

“Good artist copy, great artist steal.”

No human has truly had an original thought in their head ever. It’s all stolen knowledge, whether we realize it’s stolen or not. In the age of the Internet, we steal now more than ever.

We practice Fair Use on a regular basis by using and remixing images and videos into other videos, but isn’t that similar to an AI bot looking at an image, figuring out some weights from it, and throwing it away? I don’t own this picture of Brian Eno, but it’s certainly sitting in my browser cache, and Brian Eno and Getty Images didn’t grant me “informed consent” to do anything with it. Did I steal it? Is it legally or morally unethical to have it sitting on my hard drive? If I photoshop it and turn it into a dragon with a mic on a mixing board, and then pass it around, is that legally or morally unethical? Fair Use says no.

It’s folly to pretend that AI should be held to a standard that we ourselves aren’t upholding.