When you use a printing press to make duplicates of someone else’s work, you don’t erase their name and replace it with yours.

amalgamating a billion different works of art into something new isn't "stealing" the art and is, in fact, something that you and literally every other artist ever does whether you know it or not, unless you've developed your art entirely cut off from the rest of society

there is no such thing as "an original idea," every idea anyone has ever had has built off of those of someone else

There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man.

Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment.

The genius of a Séguin, a Mayer, a Grove, has certainly done more to launch industry in new directions than all the capitalists in the world. But men of genius are themselves the children of industry as well as of science. Not until thousands of steam-engines had been working for years before all eyes, constantly transforming heat into dynamic force, and this force into sound, light, and electricity, could the insight of genius proclaim the mechanical origin and the unity of the physical forces. And if we, children of the nineteenth century, have at last grasped this idea, if we know now how to apply it, it is again because daily experience has prepared the way. The thinkers of the eighteenth century saw and declared it, but the idea remained undeveloped, because the eighteenth century had not grown up like ours, side by side with the steam-engine. Imagine the decades that might have passed while we remained in ignorance of this law, which has revolutionized modern industry, had Watt not found at Soho skilled workmen to embody his ideas in metal, bringing all the parts of his engine to perfection, so that steam, pent in a complete mechanism, and rendered more docile than a horse, more manageable than water, became at last the very soul of modern industry.

Every machine has had the same history — a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.

Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle — all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.

By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say — This is mine, not yours?

• bread book

I think that's a misunderstanding of how the technology works. It's not directly lifting parts of a piece (unless perhaps you tell it directly to do something to a one), it's trying to replicate something similar in combination with a given prompt, no different than if I were to draw in someone's style or take inspiration from their work except for the obvious automation of the task.

When you use a printing press to make duplicates of someone else’s work, you don’t erase their name and replace it with yours.

Except you're able to reproduce written works at a much faster rate with a printing press than laboriously writing it on manuscript. Plus, it's extremely trivial to maliciously misattribute the work (you literally just replace the real author's name with someone else). The only way for the real author to fight back is to either partner up with someone who also has a printing press in order to match the production speed of the misattributed work or get the state to shut down the fraud's printing press. Trying to outproduce the printing press by writing it faster or going "uh actually, I wrote that" to everyone you know is an exercise in futility.

I mean I would count the lettering - calligraphy is a thing, isn't it? There's also the matter of illuminations and other marginalia that wouldn't be replicated via the printing press.

A key point for me is that the AI can't draw "whatever they want". It can follow a prompt, but it's never going to perfectly recreate the idea someone has in their head. Sometimes it's hard to even get something remotely similar to your prompt, much less something that matches up with your vision. That makes art aiming to express something specific or make a point hard to do unless you do post processing.

Also, it's not stealing. The AI aims to make something similar to whatever you've provided it with for inspiration. Sure, you could tell it explicitly to modify a work of art - but at that point what's the difference between that and and doing it yourself? The fact that a robot's taking care of it? Why does the level of individual effort put into it matter?

still the exact same words that a human wrote

:michael-laugh: :michael-laugh: :michael-laugh: ah thank god i can stroll into a shop and get the same King Lear as it was printed in 1608 and my copy will be exactly the same as anyone else's!

Depends on how you define making or creating - the AI does nothing without a prompt input

Nooo I wanted to respond you had good points :(