Konogan

I'm not saying artists are rent-seekers, I'm saying copyright laws in their current form enables and encourage exploitative and rent-seeking behaviors.

See what others said about Mickey Mouse, or things like Copyright Trolls. In the end, its not even demonstrably clear that copyright accomplish its stated purpose of promoting innovation. Otherwise, there's plenty of valid criticism of copyright laws.

I essentially agree; But I'd like to add the nuance that in both instances, it's the commercial usage of the imitations which is unlawful. That is fine.

What doesn't really makes sense to regulate what AIs can digest, as, as you've shown, there's already regulations that effectively render the final use of those imitations unlawful.

I don't have a cause, I'm not an ardent anti-copyright activist or anything. Don't mistake my position, of course, authors have a right to be credited, and rewarded for their arts and discoveries. I am not arguing against that.

How are you adversely affected by copyright?

I'm not so much that I'm adversely affected by copyright, as that it doesn't effectively address its stated purpose.

The thing that really bothers me personally is the exclusivity part which de facto implies a monopoly, stifling competition, engendering artificial scarcity, and limiting innovations; Those are all thing which under normal circumstances would be considered bad for an economy. Why copyright laws gets a pass?

For example, are diffusion models "stealing" art and cloning objects from their training data? [...] If the model generates code that is remarkably similar to its training data, does the copyright belong to the model and its creators, or to the original author of the training code?

Two programmers can come up with functionally identical pieces of code independently, with only superficial differences, and they effectively each own copyrights over their respective piece of code; Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think the algorithm itself can be copyrighted.

It can be argued that there is no functional difference between someone learning from examples, and an AI doing so.

The same goes for Art, imitation is central to Art, and once again one can argue that an AI should be allowed to learn freely from examples just like people do.

The problem is not inherent to AI, it is the exploitative rent-seeking behaviors that are enabled and enforced by the current copyright laws.

Hopefully, this debate can bring positive changes and reforms to these archaic policies.