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Comment by Eisenstein

5 months ago

Do you believe that music made from samples is not original?

Most of the courts don’t think they are. Early rap beats used lots of samples. Some of the most popular hip hop songs made $0 for the artists as they had to pay royalties on those samples.

  • No one cares about what the law thinks about art though, particularly for personal consumption or sharing with a small group. Copyright law doesn't even pretend to be slightly just or aligned with reality.

  • Most synthesizers use sampled instruments.

    • And those sampled instruments were copyrighted by the manufacturers: YamahaGS, RolandXM, Alesis, Korg, etc. Early hip-hop were sampling disco and R&B records and got roundly slapped once they become popular for money to be involved.

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I could see that remixes are partially original. But you're not even doing the remixing; the LLMs are.

  • Indeed.

    Text rather than music, but same argument applies: Based on what I've seen Charlie Stross blog on the topic of why he doesn't self publish/the value-add of a publisher, any creativity on the part of the prompter* of an LLM is analogous to the creativity on the part of a publisher, not on the part of an author.

    * at least for users who don't just use AI output to get past writer's block; there's lots of different ways to use AI