Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
That’s not “coming”, it’s an ongoing process that has been going on for a couple hundred years, and it absolutely does not require ChatGPT.
People genuinely underestimate how many of these things have been an ongoing concern. A lot like crypto isn’t that different to what you can do with a server, “AI” isn’t a magic key that unlocks automation. I don’t even know how this mental model works. Is the idea that companies who are currently hiring millions of copywriters will just rely on automated tools? I get that yeah, a bunch of call center people may get removed (again, a process that has been ongoing for decades), but how is compensating Facebook for scrubbing their social media posts for text data going to make that happen less?
Again, I think people don’t understand the parameters of the problem, which is different from saying that there is no problem here. If anything the conversation is a net positive in that we should have been having it in 2010 when Amazon and Facebook and Google were all-in on this process already through both ML tools and other forms of data analysis.