It was weird to realize that the books and movies were about different things

The movies are about the characters and their struggles to try and beat Sauron obviously

But the books got a lot more interesting when I started looking at them as the stories of a world and its history and the way that that world handled to coming and going of another dark lord. The threats he posed to peaceful places, the peace broken simply by his presence, and also the people and places legitimately above and outside Sauron’s reach. The fact that Sam’s star or Tom Bombadil would look at this great and terrible evil, the worst ever known to so many in the world, and to them it would be but another passing of an era, the opening of a new story dated to end like all the rest.

The scale and perspective of it all is just so dramatically different that I can’t help but feel like reaching that perspective is half the journey for the reader.

The dream would be that they manage to make their own glorious free & open source version, so that after a brief spike in corporate profit as they fire all their writers and artists, suddenly nobody needs those corps anymore because EVERYONE gets access to the same tools - if everyone has the ability to churn out massive content without hiring anyone, that theoretically favors those who never had the capital to hire people to begin with, far more than those who did the hiring.

Of course, this stance doesn’t really have an answer for any of the other problems involved in the tech, not the least of which is that there’s bigger issues at play than just “content”.

Pretty big question to analyze for a lemmy comment, but my take is it’s as good a start as I could hope for, and even if it’s wrong it’s worth trying just to learn what happens

I’m expecting a much messier “resolution” that’ll look a lot like YouTube’s copyright situation - their product can be used for copyright infringement, and they’ll be required by law to try and take appropriate measures to prevent it, but will otherwise not be held liable as long as they can claim such measures are being taken.

Having an AI recite a long text to bypass copyright seems equivalent in my mind to uploading a full movie to youtube. In both cases, some amount of moderation (itself increasingly algorithmic) is required to not only be applied, but actively developed and advanced to flout efforts to bypass it. For instance, youtube pirates will upload things with some superficial changes like a filter applied or showing the movie on a weird angle or mirrored to bypass copyright bots, which means the bots need to be more strict and better trained, or else youtube once again becomes liable for knowing about these pirates and not stopping them.

The end result, just like with youtube, will probably be that AI models have to have big, clunky algorithms applied against their outputs to recalculate or otherwise make copyright-safe anything that might remotely be an infringement. It’ll suck for normal users, pirates will still dig for ways to bypass it, and everyone will be unhappy. If youtube is any indicator, this situation can somehow remain stable for over a decade - long enough for AI devs to release a new-generation bot to restart the whole issue.

Yaaaaaaaaay