Hypercritical: I Made This

I’m a big fan of Siracusa. For years I savored every page of his Mac OS X reviews. He mostly podcasts on very long podcasts now, but occasionally we get a gem of a blog post like this. Siracusa takes a run at the challenge of intellectual property ownership behind Generative AI.

He frames this up in exactly the same way I have many times.

A human's creative work is inextricably linked to their life experiences: every piece of art they've ever seen, everything they've done, everyone they've ever met. And yet we still say the creative output of humans is worthy of legal protection (with some fairly narrow restrictions for works that are deemed insufficiently differentiated from existing works).

Some say that generative AI is no different. Its output is inextricably linked to its "life experience" (training data). Everything it creates is influenced by everything it has ever seen. It's doing the same thing a human does, so why shouldn't its output be treated the same as a human's output?

He ultimately doesn't feel that this is a sufficient way to look at the problem. I agree, and how he breaks down the related topics is really good and interesting. Worth digging into and thinking about for yourself.

I love how he closed.

I'm not sure what the right answer is, but I think I'm getting closer to the right question. It's a question I think we're all going to encounter a lot more frequently in the future: Who made this?

It is the right question, but in the age of AI what if it isn't answerable because there is no "Who".

null made this?