In an opinion piece for the New York Times, columnist Farhad Manjoo has a more positive take on generative AI.
Manjoo doesn’t think generative AI will displace human creators, at least not to the extent feared: “Indeed, I’d bet that artists and creative industries will ultimately find A.I. to be more of a boon than a competitor.”
At the same time, Manjoo thinks that generative AI should be allowed to learn from human copyrighted content (AI models are trained on vast amounts of content to recognize patterns). He writes, “When a machine is trained to understand language and culture by poring over a lot of stuff online, it is acting, philosophically at least, just like a human being who draws inspiration from existing work.”
Plus, Manjoo takes a quite permissive approach to remixing based on prior works: ” A.I. probably shouldn’t be allowed to create direct copies of existing works, but it seems wise to allow it the same freedom to remix art that humans enjoy.”
Of course, not everyone agrees with Manjoo’s take on AI. Indeed, many of the commenters disagree.