At a Senate hearing on AI’s impact on journalism, lawmakers backed media industry calls to make OpenAI and other tech companies pay to license news articles and other data used to train algorithms.
“What would that even look like?” asks Sarah Kreps, who directs the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. “Requiring licensing data will be impractical, favor the big firms like OpenAI and Microsoft that have the resources to pay for these licenses, and create enormous costs for startup AI firms that could diversify the marketplace and guard against hegemonic domination and potential antitrust behavior of the big firms.”
As our economy becomes more and more driven by AI, legislation like this will guarantee Microsoft and Google get to own it.
And what about the authors whose works were injected without compensation? What should we do for them? I don’t think that these commercial AI models should get to infringe on their copyrights for nothing. If I pay for a ChatGPT subscription and ask it to tell me about the war the Middle East and it basically regurgitates and plagiarizes information it learned from a journalist, then ChatGPT has essentially stolen the copyrighted work from that journalist and the revenue that my click would have earned them.
I don’t see a problem using publicly posted copyrighted data for non-commercial use for training local language models but don’t think its fair to allow copyright infringement for commercial use.
I think it’s better be pragmatic then to give everything to the big corporations.
OpenAi isn’t going to takes it tool offline so the loss of revenue isn’t going away. Payments won’t end up in the pockets of any individual journalist. The money the few journalistic sites will receive will be used to pay for the subscription fee to the next big model while cutting off their staff since it will net them more money.
If this goes through, Google and Microsoft will spend the next few years buying data or the companies that have it. The walls will be raised and we will be fucked, legislation will only help them.
And there is simply not enough public domain data to build a competitive product. Better to tax and redistribute tohrough UBI while keeping the field competitive and avoiding monopolies.
Well fuck all those artists and writers who made the original works then I guess. Licensing is impractical.
I think it would be better to enforce open, readable training sets that anyone can browse through to submit legal requests
Removed by mod
The irony this is coming back to being a copyright extension issue in the year of our lord and savior, Steamboat Willie, is not lost on me.
Are they going to pay for anything that ever inspired them? Every time you publish an article, you owe a dollar to every English teacher you ever had? Fill out your taxes and you owe your math teachers?
It’s fucking goofy…
That’s a pretty dumb comparison. Are you suggesting that people who create stuff used to train AI are obligated to provide that education for free? People who create books/educational aids for teachers to use in classrooms still demand to be paid for that. Teachers are paid for delivering that education. The kids don’t pay the teachers, as a society we tax people because education benefits us all, but the teachers are still paid (not enough!)
Human brain (any brain, really) is a natural neural network which is trained throughout its life the same way an artificial neural network is. Nothing is original, every creator is “stealing” from every other creator who’s work they have studied to become better creators. No creator ever in history has created anything in pure, absolute vaccuum. Every creation is a remix and amalgamation of previously created works.
And intellectual property is a spook , anyway. No-one can own an idea.
I hate the term intellectual property. It’s a word used to describe vastly different concepts with vastly different legal backgrounds and problems.
Copyright is theoretically a good thing, giving an artist or writer the time to profit from their work before the work becomes public domain, incentivizing the work. The current international agreements around it are absolutely bonkers thanks to Disney. The fact that the copyright persists after death, let alone for a century, is complete madness. The artist obviously can’t profit from their work after they’re dead. It’s an absolute shameless cash grab that destroys culture.
Patents are also theoretically a good thing, allowing companies to release specifications of machines that allow for 10 years of exclusive use. Without patents, companies would hide their designs as trade secrets. It guarantees that after a decade, the designs will be publicly available for anyone to see. They need to be much more heavily restricted in what you can put patents on though. Patenting a specific machine design is fine, patenting molecules or math breaks the entire system. Software patents are blatantly absurd and broken.
EDIT: Should also mention that 3D printers are a patent success story of the system working as intended. Patented in 1986, the inventor made good money making expensive bespoke machines with his own company. In 1996, the patent expired and we had an explosion of competing machines, getting ever cheaper and more effective. Everybody won. The inventor made bank for his decade of exclusivity, and then everyone benefited from the design being public domain, free for everyone to use.
Trade secrets, the protection of specific recipes, client lists and strategies, can be abused to protect companies against disclosing information that may be very pertinent to their customers and governments. The Coca-Cola recipe or lists of clients as a trade secret is fine imho, but they can also abuse trade secret law to hide systems that lie about your car’s emissions.
Trademarks help protect consumers against knockoff brands that pretend to be what they’re not. This is the least abused type of “IP”. This doesn’t mean there aren’t bad actors out there registering tons of different trademarks to squat on those designs & names, hoping to force a new company to pay up to use the name. Trademark squatting could theoretically be solved by annulling the trademark if the company isn’t actively using it. Trademarks are currently much too easy to maintain.
All of this to say, lumping all of these different laws into “IP” is not useful at all when talking about the goals of the different legislations, what they’re trying to do, and how they fail.
Property is a spook generally.
But I can’t blame journalist’s for wanting to eat.
Which is what this is really about. Food and paying the bills. Not intellectual property.
