It's interesting to hear people side with the artists when in previous discussions on this forum I've gotten significant approval/agreement arguing that copyright is far too long.<p>As I've argued in the past, I think copyright should last maybe five years: in this modern era, monetizing your work doesn't (usually) have to take more than a short time. I'd happily concede to some sort of renewal process to extend that period, especially if some monetization method is in process. Or some sort of mechanical rights process to replace the "public domain" phase early on. Or something -- I haven't thought about it <i>that</i> deeply.<p>So thinking about that in this process: everyone is "ghiblifying" things. Studio Ghibli has been around for very nearly 40 years, and their "style" was well established over 35 years ago. To me, that (should) make(s) it fair game.<p>The underlying assumption, I think, is that all the "starving" artists are being ripped off, but are they? Let's consider the numbers -- there are a handful of large-scale artists whose work is obviously replicable: Ghibli, the Simpsons, Pixar, etc. None of them is going hungry because a machine model can render a prom pic in their style. Then you get the other 99.999% of artists, <i>all</i> of whose work went into the model. They <i>will</i> be hurt, but not specifically because <i>their</i> style has been ingested and people want to replicate <i>their</i> style.<p>Rather, they will be hurt because no one knows their style, nor cares about it; people just want to be able to say e.g. "Make a charcoal illustration of me in this photo, but make me sitting on a horse in the mountains."<p>It's very much like the arguments about piracy in the past: 99.99% of people were never going to pay an artist to create that charcoal sketch. The 0.01% who might are arguably causing harm to the artist(s) by not using them to create that thing, but the rest were never going to pay for it in the first place.<p>All to say it's complicated, and obviously things are changing dramatically, but it's difficult to make the argument that "artists need to be compensated for their work being used to train the model" without both a reasonable plan for how that might be done, and a better-supported argument for why.