AI Copying Is Not The Same As Human Copying | Commentary

AI copyright litigation that will define media and entertainment industry economics for decades to come is winding its way through the courts. 

In all these infringement cases, essentially no one disputes that AI copies entire libraries of copyrighted works word-for-word (or image-by-image, note-for-note) when it trains on them without consent. Rather, those who try to defend it simply point out that the end result of AI’s heist frequently shows no direct relation to the original.

These defenders say its copying is fundamentally no different than what human artists have done since the beginning of time: build their creative works on top of the building blocks of others before them.