VoidByte our friendly neighborhood hacker

This discussion of AI lawsuits like those of Microsoft & Stable Diffusion reminded me of All the Music LLC and how they managed to "copyright all the melodies" by generating MIDI files of every single possible melody ever.

While ChatGPT could not answer how one could generate all possible algorithms, it was nice enough to generate an answer for the following prompt:

Write a python function that creates all possible instruction combinations given a list of assembly instructions.

The generated response was pretty close to what I would have come up with to get the cartesian product of all possible instruction combinations.

If it is possible to use this sort of algorithm to find all possible instruction combinations on every single CPU architecture, including undocumented instructions uncovered by Chris Domas' sandsifter tool, you would think that'd be enough to never have a single algorithm lawsuit ever again. Sadly, computer science and programming is more of an art and a meta-science than it is a hard science as different applications of these algorithms make up artistic expressions that is more copyrightable than "store the data for a customer in some file" or "draw a triangle to the screen".

I would love for the original authors of these works to be compensated for their time and contribution to these AI systems that are at the moment, just very smart parrots, rather than the lean mean abstraction machines we think they are thanks to the power of linear algebra. At this point, where do we draw the line on what is an "artistic expression" that is copyrightable and what we consider a set of functions that library authors maintain and get criminally underpaid for relative to the value that is created by all its users and companies that integrate it into their products?

The answer to that question might determine whether we have another Napster moment where unfettered use of AI makes the users legally liable instead of the AI tool makers and we'll eventually have a marketplace of solutions like iTunes or a more generalized version of the Unity asset store to hopefully pay developers fairly for their hard work.  

I understand that there's more to music than just melody such as rhythm, harmony, and timbre among a few other things.  I'd just like to know what exactly makes computer programs more than algorithms and instructions running on a CPU.