Syne Scratch

It’s annoying that the world is a sort of result of echoancholy. Inherent sadness that everything has basically already been discovered that would’ve been reasonable for you to discover. The thought experiments from Rawls for veil of ignorance and original position sort of legitimize it. Still, the idea of novelty is important in things like copyright law. The world needs people producing new stuff.

So how do you square AI being an amazing creative tool with the need for humans to produce analog works to create a better base of resources for generative AI to pull from? I don’t think there’s a good answer.

The original idea of copyright law was to incentivize people to produce new things for the benefit of everyone. The issue you run into is most people, at best, have one good novel in them so you can’t pay them to be career writers . . . except you get the occasional person like Stephen King who has like 50 good novels in him and, well, the world is better off if that guy just keeps nonstop writing.

But the point of this post was novelty. You, as a human creative, will probably never come up with a thought that hasn’t been had by someone before. That’s okay. We put the work in to refine thoughts, communicate them better, and just improve society. It’s a lunch-pail job, but the value of lunch-pail jobs has been too far minimized.