I have to go all the way back to 2005, to one of the very first things I ever posted, because it stops me cold now. It was called "Illegal Art." "Download anything illegal lately?" I wrote. "It seems things are getting a little bit out of hand. The RIAA is getting serious, suing everyone from old ladies to fifteen-year-old honor students." I was a kid, uneasy about an industry treating the copy as a crime. (Illegal Art was (and still is) a great place to download music from bands like Girl Talk circa 2002-2010).
The question that now defines generative AI, what do we owe to the people whose work gets copied, and is the copy really the enemy, turns out to be the question the industry was wondering way back when. It is the heart of the US Copyright Office's work on AI and of the EU AI Act's rules on training data and disclosure. The music industry's panic in 2005 was the dress rehearsal.