Once AI has been developed is either next week or next century, it remains to be seen. In the mean time, I would like to get paid for my work if possible. Why should Stephen King and George R R Martin get to have all the fun? Sure, once benevolent AI is developed we can all slumber in its arms and live our lives in perfect utopian simulations or whatever. But we are not there yet.
I fail to see how I am oppressing anyone by claiming intellectual propriety of the product of my mind. So how long should my copyright period be? A year? A month? And then what? You and Google and everyone else gets to have it? By what right?
You have to keep in mind, the futuristic evolved economy you speak of has not happened yet. However, Google wishes to scan things now. That’s the problem. The issues need to get sorted before they should be allowed to proceed. Otherwise, why would any writer bother to sit down for 6 months and write a novel?
I also refute the notion that an AI could write the same novel I could write. It would have to go back and live my life and integrate all my experiences in a creative fusion with contemporary culture. I do not see this being something an AI could do. Sure, a powerful enough AI could brute force every combination of words in the English language up to say- 100,000 words or so (which wouldn’t even get you a Game of Thrones novel) but the amount of computational power for that would be truly staggering. But the real feat would be for the AI to understand why a human would select one work as a great read and another not. We are a long long way from such a feat. Humans don’t even properly know what book will be a big hit and what not. Look at film. You can have every critic rave about a film and it can be a financial failure because nobody liked it. You’d have to teach an AI to be irrational to even come close and we haven’t even made a rational AI yet.
For all we know, once AI has been created they will create their own sort of copyright laws that prevent humans from benefiting from the product of their intellect. This gets back to the whole ‘how can you know the mind of god’ argument. Sure, we might like to project what a super AI might do but it will most likely be incomprehensible to us and we beneath its notice.
