I think you’re conflating average and mean. When it comes to income average is typically median, which does include billionaires but wouldn’t skew the data due to their inclusion.

It’s a bit of both. Infants have more neural plasticity as others have mentioned, so when using the same learning strategy babies are going to learn better. That said, adults have a lot more knowledge and experience and are able to make connections to a lot more things; so there are methods aimed at teaching adults that are more effective than methods used to teach babies.

I don’t think the potential difference between how much damage can be caused is a reasonable argument. After all, economic damages to writers from others copying, plagiarizing their work or style or world is limited not because it’s hard for humans to do so, but because we made it illegal to make something so similar to another person’s copyrighted work.

For example, Harry Potter has absolutely been copied to the extent legally allowed, but no one cares about any of those books because they’re not so similar that they affect the sales of Harry Potter at all. And that’s also true for AI. It doesn’t matter how closely it can replicate someone’s style or story if that replication can never be used or sold due to copyright infringement, which is already the case right now. Sure you can use it to generate thousands of books that are just different enough to not get struck down, but that wouldn’t affect the original book at all.

Now, to be fair, with art you can be more similar to others art, because of how art works. But also, to be fair, the art market was never about how good an artist was, it was about how expensive the rich people who bought your art wanted it to be for tax purposes. And I doubt AI art is valuable for that.

But the thing is, it’s not similar to turning their work into a play or a TV show. You aren’t replicating their story at all, they put words in a logical order and you are using that to teach the AI what the next word logically could be.

As for humans taking much more time to properly mimic style, of course that’s true (assuming untrained). But an AI requires far more memory and data to do that. A human can replicate a style with just examples of that style given time. An AI needs to scrape basically the entire internet (and label it, which takes quite some time) to be able to do so. They may need different things but it’s ridiculous to say that they’re completely incomparable. Besides, you make it sound like AI is it’s own entity that wasn’t created, trained, and used by humans in the first place.

I don’t see why they (authors/copyright holders) have any right to prevent use of their product beyond purchasing. If I legally own a copy of Game of Thrones, I should be able to do whatever the crap I want with it.

And basically, I can. I can quote parts of it, I can give it to a friend to read, I can rip out a page and tape it to the wall, I can teach my kid how to read with it.

Why should I not be allowed to train my AI with it? Why do you think it’s unethical?