I’m of the general opinion that any AI-derived work should not be saleable at any value, should not be eligible for copyright or trademark, and should come with something that makes it clear that AI was used in the process of its creation, ideally noting how and to what extent. But I believe that it should be perfectly valid to circulate and use with those stipulations adhered to.
I recognize that there are several problems with my opinion in execution.
As AI advances, such works will be more and more difficult to detect with certainty. It is already difficult to detect and prove the AI origin of any work, especially if it there is a mixture of some AI and some human-origin content. There’s also the question of the context of the AI-generated work, is it a fiction novel? Character art? A working program with actual utility? How much AI influence is enough to negate the value of the end product? Does having a bounty of freely available AI works smother interest in human works?
If an AI provides a pseudocode blueprint of your program, and then you write all the code based on that blueprint yourself, should you not be allowed to make profit off the sale of the program?
If an AI actually code the entire working program, one that works perfectly for its task, should you not be allowed to make profit off the sale of the program?
If an AI gives you a framework for a story, and you write the actual story following the framework and adjusting as you go, does that much assistance negate the labor you performed?
If the end user cannot tell the difference between the two, does it matter?
There are endless questions like these that make an easy answer difficult to arrive at.
All that said, I divide things into two camps, personally. Utility, sentimentality. In the utility camp, I’m looking at things like user interfaces/character/setting/iconography art, actual code, translations, editing, etc. If I want something for its utility, I don’t care about the creator or process behind it, it has a job to do, and it either does it or doesn’t. In the sentimentality camp, that’s where self-expression has value and the creator matters to me. A song, or poem, or painting that shows me how the painter views the world or some part or piece of it. A book that allows me to connect with someone, even a fictional character, on a human level.
My hope is that we can figure out how to use AI and advancements like it to make utility-oriented works widely, easily, and freely available, without smothering works with sentimental value.
I don’t believe in capitalism as an ideal of any kind, and wish we lived in a world where people’s livelihoods didn’t depend on turning themselves and their works into commodities for sale just to have a place to eat or sleep, and I think all of this would be easier in that world, but in the world we live in, I recognize that this is displacing jobs and talented people, and I regret that. I think we’ll survive it though. It will find its niche, people will adapt to its existence, we’ll move on, just like we always have.
)