{"id":28139,"date":"2023-01-06T10:38:20","date_gmt":"2023-01-06T10:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2023\/01\/06\/patterns-culture-and-theft-seths-blog\/"},"modified":"2023-01-06T10:38:20","modified_gmt":"2023-01-06T10:38:20","slug":"patterns-culture-and-theft-seths-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2023\/01\/06\/patterns-culture-and-theft-seths-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Patterns, culture and theft | Seth’s Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"

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AI is here, and it can (or soon will) be able to draw, code, or write with more skill than most of us.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s tireless, very fast and very cheap.<\/p>\n

Understandably, some creators are up in arms. They say that if an AI is trained on their photographs, their architectural designs or their cartoons, it\u2019s a form of theft.<\/p>\n

This doesn\u2019t hold up.<\/p>\n

If an art student studies all of Picasso\u2019s 10,000 paintings and then creates a new painting that is clearly based on them, we call this the advancement of culture. The same is true if a writer uses a word that was coined by Shakespeare, or if a graffitist is clearly inspired by Shepard Fairey.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how culture evolves. Taking an idea isn\u2019t theft. Taking an idea is an oxymoron. Ideas belong to all of us.<\/p>\n

We couldn\u2019t and wouldn\u2019t have it any other way. There\u2019s no way to bake a cake, drive a car or write a sentence without using what came before.<\/p>\n

GPT and other AI tools don\u2019t actually know<\/em> anything. They\u2019re pattern matchers and pattern extenders. And those patterns are called culture.<\/p>\n

(Aside: There\u2019s a difference between copyright and trademark. Copyright is a small carve out to protect the actual craft of creativity and its specific outputs. Trademark is a way to signal to the world who made something. If someone uses AI to copy an artist\u2019s style and then tries to pass it off as coming from the artist, that is<\/em> theft. Theft of trademark<\/a>. Different discussion for another day.)<\/p>\n

If a computer or a person steals your style, it\u2019s an indication that you\u2019ve made an impact on the culture. And the only response is to dig deeper and make another impact on the culture, not try to carve out your contributions to our shared modes of interaction.<\/p>\n

The only thing that allows creators to create is the work that came before. When we create, we add to that work so that others can do the same.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n