The Reader's Digest version is something like this...

Use of AI has generated many headlines in 2022 due to unresolved legal issues that can have important economic impacts in both engineering and the arts but AI also has unique impacts on art itself, not just as an output or product but as a process that itself has value for both the creator of the art and the consumer.

On the economic front, use of AI in software engineering is generating conflict between current copyright holders owning existing source code (proprietary and open source) and entities that have trained new AI algorithms for auto-generation of new software by scanning millions of lines of source code housed in GitHub. Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub in 2018 spooked many of its users despite claims from Microsoft that the acquisition was aimed at supporting the open source community and publicly signaling that Microsoft aimed to adopt many open-source techniques for building its own commercial products. In 2022, Microsoft announced a tool called CoPilot that leverages patterns from scans of source code repositories in GitHub to auto-suggest full statements or full blocks of code in real time as developers type, saving them time and encouraging re-use of existing patterns. However, existing GitHub users were not informed BEFORE those scans of this new use of their code to have a chance to remove their code and not participate in having their intellectual property re-used without attribution.

Also on the economic front, the US Copyright Office has established a policy which will DENY copyright protections to works created by AI tools. Of course, that current policy hasn't clarified the DEGREE of use of AI technologies that will trigger such an exclusion. Does the work have to be ENTIRELY created by AI tools with just a few general 'hints' from the creator? Or does ANY use of AI in creating a work block its eligibility for copyright protection? This can have HUGE economic impacts in entertainment realms. If a band uses an AI program to create a music video for their new vividly impressionistic hit song, will the creator be powerless to block others from using that video after it becomes popular to draw away listens or views for their own economic benefit, depriving the artist of that revenue?

At the purely artistic layer, debating the use of AI as purely an issue of productivity and cost-reduction overlooks a more important function of the process of creating art and how that process affects the artist, affects the ideas the artist injects into the art and thus the ideas that reach the audience. Poorly thought out copyright enforcement that reduces the economic value of artistic works to the creator is bad enough, but short-circuiting part of the creative process itself that helps refine and improve ideas reflected in art could be a more important impact of AI.


WTH