OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/openai-urges-trump-either-settle-ai-copyright-debate-or-lose-ai-race-to-china/Open linkView original on lemmy.dbzer0.com1225
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That's a good litmus test. If asking/paying artists to train your AI destroys your business model, maybe you're the arsehole. ;)
Not only that, but their business model doesn't hold up if they were required to provide their model weights for free because the material that went into it was "free".
There's also an argument that if the business was that reliant on free things to start with, then it shouldn't be a business.
No-one would bat their eyes if the CEO of a real estate company was sobbing that it's the end of the rental market, because the company is no longer allowed to get houses for free.
You misspelled capitalism.
Unregulated capitalism. That’s why people in dominant market positions want less regulation.
Entrenched companies often want more regulation to prevent startup competition. Pulling the ladder up behind them.
To be fair, they want more regulation n others, not on them. Specially if they’re doing shady things.
Not to be contrarian, but there is a cost to extract those "free" resources; like labor, equipment, transportation, lobbying (AKA: bribes for the non-Americans), processing raw material into something useful, research and development, et cetera.
While true, they tend not to bare the costs of the environmental damage, at least when these activities are poorly regulated.
Was about to post the same thing
If basic economics get you upset, then alright.
Bye o/
The entire internet is built on free things.
Just saying.
Doesn't mean that businesses should allowed to be.
Agribusiness in shambles after draining the water table (it is still free)
even the top phds can learn things off the amount of books that openai could easily purchase, assuming they can convince a judge that if the works aren't pirated the "learning" is fair use. however, they're all pirating and then regurgitating the works which wouldn't really be legal even if a human did it.
also, they can't really say how they need fair use and open standards and shit and in the next breathe be begging trump to ban chinese models. the cool thing about allowing china to have global influence is that they will start to respect IP more... or the US can just copy their shit until they do.
imo that would have been the play against tik tok etc. just straight up we will not protect the IP of your company (as in technical IP not logo, etc.) until you do the same. even if it never happens, we could at least have a direct tik tok knock off and it could "compete" for american eyes rather than some blanket ban bullshit.
This particular vein of "pro-copyright" thought continuously baffles me. Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
Its totally valid to hate these AI companies. But its absolutely just industry propaganda to think that copyright was protecting your data on your behalf
You are correct, copyright is ownership, not income. I own the copyright for all my work (but not work for hire) and what I do with it is my discretion.
What is income, is the content I sell for the price acceptable to the buyer. Copyright (as originally conceived) is my protection so someone doesn't take my work and use it to undermine my skillset. One of the reasons why penalties for copyright infringement don't need actual damages and why Facebook (and other AI companies) are starting to sweat bullets and hire lawyers.
That said, as a creative who relied on artistic income and pays other creatives appropriately, modern copyright law is far, far overreaching and in need of major overhaul. Gatekeeping was never the intent of early copyright and can fuck right off; if I paid for it, they don't get to say no.
https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
This research paper from Rufus Pollock in 2009 suggests that the optimal timeframe for copyright is 15 years. I've been referencing this for, well, 16 years now, a year longer than the optimum copyright range. If I recall correctly I first saw this referenced by Mike Masnick of techdirt.
Gatekeeping absolutely was the intention of copyright, not to provide artists with income.
By gatekeeping I mean the use of digital methods to verify or restrict use of purchased copyright material after a sale such as Digital rights management, encryption such as CSS/AACS/HDCP, or obfuscation.
The whole "you didn't buy a copy, you bought a license" BS undermines what copyright was supposed to be IMO.
Copyright does not give the holder control over every "use", especially something as vague as "using it to undermine their skillset".
Copyright gives the rights holder a limited monopoly on three activities: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly.
Not all uses involve making a copy, derivative, or performance.
Bingo. I was being more general in my response, but that is the more technical way of putting it.
Wrong in all points.
Copyright has paid artists (though maybe not enough). Copyright was intended to do that (though maybe not that alone). Copyright does currently pay artists (maybe not in your country, I don't know that).
No, actually, I'm not at all. In-fact, I'm totally right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhBpI13dxkI
Copyright originated create a monopoly to protect printers, not artists, to create a monopoly around a means of distribution.
How many artists do you know? You must know a few. How many of them have received any income through copyright. I dare you, to in good faith, try and identify even one individual you personally know, engaged in creative work, who makes any meaningful amount of money through copyright.
I know several artists living off of selling their copyrighted work, and no one in the history of the Internet has ever watched a 55 minute YouTube video someone linked to support their argument.
Cool. What artist?
Edit because I didn't read the second half of your comment. If you are too up-your-own ass and anti-intellectual to educate yourself on this matter, maybe just don't have an opinion.
I know quite a few people who rely on royalties for a good chunk of their income. That includes musicians, visual artists and film workers.
Saying it doesn’t exist seems very ignorant.
Cool. What artists?
Any experienced union film director, editor, DOP, writer, sound designer comes to mind (at least where I’m from)
Cool. Name one. A specific one that we can directly reference, where they themselves can make that claim. Not a secondary source, but a primary one. And specifically, not the production companies either, keeping in mind that the argument that I'm making is that copyright law, was intended to protect those who control the means of production and the production system itself. Not the artists.
The artists I know, and I know several. They make their money the way almost all people make money, by contracting for their time and services, or through selling tickets and merchandise, and through patreon subscriptions: in other words, the way artists and creatives have always made their money. The "product" in the sense of their music or art being a product, is given away practically for free. In fact, actually for free in the case of the most successful artists I know personally. If they didn't give this "product" of their creativity away for free, they would not be able to survive.
There is practically 0 revenue through copyright. Production companies like Universal make money through copyright. Copyright was also built, and historically based intended for, and is currently used for, the protection of production systems: not artists.
You forgot to link a legitimate source.
A lecture from a professional free software developer and activist whose focus is the legal history and relevance of copyright isn't a legitimate source? His website: https://questioncopyright.org/promise/index.html
The anti-intelectualism of the modern era baffles me.
Also, he's on the fediverse!
kfogel.org
@[email protected]
YouTube is not a legitimate source. The prof is fine but video only links are for the semi literate. It is frankly rude to post a minor comment and expect people to endure a video when a decent reader can absorb the main points from text in 20 seconds.
Interesting copyright question: if I own a copy of a book, can I feed it to a local AI installation for personal use?
Can a library train a local AI installation on everything it has and then allow use of that on their library computers? <— this one could breathe new life into libraries
First off, I'm by far no lawyer, but it was covered in a couple classes.
According to law as I know it, question 1 yes if there is no encryption, and question 2 no.
In reality, if you keep it for personal use, artists don't care. A library however, isn't personal use and they have to jump through more hoops than a circus especially when it comes to digital media.
But you raise a great point! I'd love to see a law library train AI for in-house use and test the system!
I wonder if there's some validity to what OpenAI is saying though (but I certainly don't completely agree with them).
If the US makes it too costly to train AI models, then maybe China will relax any copyright laws so that Chinese AI models can be trained quickly and cheaply. This might result in China developing better AI models than the US.
Maybe the US should require AI companies to pay a large chunk of their profits to copyright holders. So copyright holders would be compensated, but an AI company would only have to pay if they generate profits.
Maybe someone more knowledgeable in this field will tell me I'm totally wrong.
No, it means that copyrights should not exist in the first place.
I'm fine with this. "We can't succeed without breaking the law" isn't much of an argument.
Do I think the current copyright laws around the world are fine? No, far from it.
But why do they merit an exception to the rules that will make them billions, but the rest of us can be prosecuted in severe and dramatic fashion for much less. Try letting the RIAA know you have a song you've downloaded on your PC that you didn't pay for - tell them it's for "research and training purposes", just like AI uses stuff it didn't pay for - and see what I mean by severe and dramatic.
It should not be one rule for the rich guys to get even richer and the rest of us can eat dirt.
Figure out how to fix the laws in a way that they're fair for everyone, including figuring out a way to compensate the people whose IP you've been stealing.
Until then, deal with the same legal landscape as everyone else. Boo hoo
🌏👨🚀🔫👨🚀🌌
I also think it's really rich that at the same time they're whining about copyright they're trying to go private. I feel like the 'Open' part of OpenAI is the only thing that could possibly begin to offset their rampant theft and even then they're not nearly open enough.
They are not releasing anything of value in open source recently.
Sam altman said they were on the wrong side of history about this when deepseek released.
They are not open anymore I want that to be clear. They decided to stop releasing open source because 💵💵💵💵💵💵💵💵.
So yeah I can have huge fines for downloading copyrighted material where I live, and they get to make money out of that same material without even releasing anything open source? Fuck no.
Absolutely agreed - and to make matters worse, their clearly stated goals ultimately amount to replacing all of us with their AI. This deal just keeps getting better, doesn't it?
But I can't pirate copyrighted materials to "train" my own real intelligence.
In the end, we're just training some non-artifical intelligence.
Yeah, you can train your own neural network on pirated content, all right, but you better not enjoy that content at the same time or have any feelings while watching it, because that's not covered by "training".
Don't worry: the law will be very carefully crafted so that it will be legal only if they do it, not us.
Fine by me. Can it be over today?
Training that AI is absolutely fair use.
Selling that AI service that was trained on copyrighted material is absolutely not fair use.
"We can't succeed without breaking the law. We can't succeed without operating unethically."
I'm so sick of this bullshit. They pretend to love a free market until it's not in their favor and then they ask us to bend over backwards for them.
Too many people think they're superior. Which is ironic, because they're also the ones asking for handouts and rule bending. If you were superior, you wouldn't need all the unethical things that you're asking for.
That sounds like a you problem.
"Our business is so bad and barely viable that it can only survive if you allow us to be overtly unethical", great pitch guys.
I mean that's like arguing "our economy is based on slave plantations! If you abolish the practice, you'll destroy our nation!"
Good point. I've never seen it framed this way before. Poignant.
Thanks, heh, I just came back to look at what I'd written again, as it was 6am when I posted that, and sometimes I say some stupid shit when I'm still sleepy. Nice to know that I wasn't spouting nonsense.
Come on guys, his company is only worth $157 billion.
Of course he can't pay for content he needs for his automated bullshit machine. He's not made of money!
Company burning stacks of hundred dollar bills to generate power to run hallucination machine worth $157 billion. What a world.
Good if AI fails because it can't abuse copyright. Fuck AI.
*except the stuff used for science that isn't trained on copyrighted scraped data, that use is fine
Yeah unfortunately we’ve started calling any LLM “AI”
In ye old notation ML was a subset of AI, and thus all LLM would be considered AI. It's why manual decision trees that codify get NPC behaviour are also called AI, because it is.
Now people use AI to refer only to generative ML, but that's wrong and I'm willing to complain every time.
Sam Altman is a grifter, but on this topic he is right.
The reality is, that IP laws in their current form hamper innovation and technological development. Stephan Kinsella has written on this topic for the past 25 years or so and has argued to reform the system.
Here in the Netherlands, we know that it's true. Philips became a great company because they could produce lightbulbs here, which were patented in the UK. We also had a booming margarine business, because we weren't respecting British and French patents and that business laid the foundation for what became Unilever.
And now China is using those exact same tactics to build up their industry. And it gives them a huge competitive advantage.
A good reform would be to revert back to the way copyright and patent law were originally developed, with much shorter terms and requiring a significant fee for a one time extension.
The current terms, lobbied by Disney, are way too restrictive.
I totally agree. Patents and copyright have their place, but through greed they have been morphed into monstrous abominations that hold back society. I also think that if you build your business on crawled content, society has a right to the result to a fair price. If you cannot provide that without the company failing, then it deserves to fail because the business model obviously was built on exploitation.
I agree, which is why I advocate for reform, not abolishment.
Perhaps AI companies should pay a 15% surcharge on their services and that money goes directly into the arts.
But Sam is talking about copyright and all your examples are patents
It just so happens that in AI it's about copyright and with margarine (and most other technologies) it's about patents.
But the point is the same. Technological development is held back by law in both cases.
If all IP laws were reformed 50 years ago, we would probably have the technology from 2050, today.
It's all the same shit. No patents and copyrights should exist.
Is it? In Sam's case, we're mostly talking about creative products in the form of text, audio, and video. If an artist releases a song and the song is copyrighted, it doesn't hamper innovation and technological development. The same cannot be said when a company patents a sorting algorithm, the method for swiping to unlock a smartphone, or something similar.
If copyrights are used to add a huge price tag to any AI development, then it did just hamper innovation and technological development.
And sadly, what most are clamoring for will disproportionately affect open source development.
If open source apps can't be copyrighted then the GPL is worthless and that will harm open source development much more
I'm not sure how that applies in the current context, where it would be used as training data.
Because once you can generate the GPL code from the lossy ai database trained on it the GPL protection is meaningless.
That's not fair to change the system only when businesses require it. I received a fuckin' letter from a government entity where I live for having downloaded the trash tier movie "Demolition".
I agree copyright and patents are bad but it's so infuriating that only the rich and powerful can choose not to respect it.
So I think openAI has to pay because as of now that shitty copyright and patent system is still there and has hurt many individuals around the world.
We should try to change the laws for copyright but after the big businesses pay their due.
Lmao Sam Altman doesn't want tbe rules chanhed for you. He wants it changed for him.
You will still be beholden to the laws.
Slave owners might go broke after abolition? 😂
If giant megacorporations can benefit by ignoring copyright, us mortals should be able to as well.
Until then, you have the public domain to train on. If you don't want AI to talk like the 1920s, you shouldn't have extended copyright and robbed society of a robust public domain.
So pirating full works for commercial use suddenly is "fair use", or what? Lets see what e.g. Disney says about this.
That's like calling stealing from shops essential for my existence and it would be "over" for me if they stop me. The shit these clowns say is just astounding. It's like they have no morals and no self awareness and awareness for people around them.
What's really fucked up is that for some people this is not far from their reality at all
I think they are either completely delusional, or they know very well how important AI is for the government and the military. The same cannot be said for regular people and their daily struggles.
In America, companies have more rights than the human person.
If companies say that they need to do something to survive, that makes it ok. If a human needs to do something to survive, that's a crime.
Know the difference. (/s)
It’s like stealing from shops except the shops didn’t lose anything. You’re up a stolen widget, but they have just as many as before.
Copyright should not exist in the first place.
It should exist
A creator should own their creation and be able to defend misuse of it for a period of time. Current copyright laws are bullshit though.
I was thinking at the same thing
No
The only way this would be ok is if openai was actually open. make the entire damn thing free and open source, and most of the complaints will go away.
“The plagiarism machine will break without more things to plagiarize.”
If I had to pay tuition for education (buying text books, pay for classes and stuff), then you have to pay me to train your stupid AI using my materials.
Copyrights should have never been extended longer than 5 years in the first place, either remove draconian copyright laws or outlaw LLM style models using copyrighted material, corpos can't have both.
Whoever brings Aaron Swartz back gets to violate all the copyright laws
Aaron Swartz was 100% opposed to all copyright laws, you remember that yah?
Yes, and he killed himself after the FBI was throwing the book at him for doing exactly what these AI assholes are doing without repercussion
And for some reason suddenly everyone leaps back to the side of the FBI and copyright because it's a meme to hate on LLMs.
It's almost like people don't have real convictions.
You can't be Team Aaron when it's popular and then Team Copyright Maximalist when the winds change and it's time to hate on LLMs or diffusion models.
I'm not just a copyright abolitionnist, I also abhor all intellectual property. Yes, even trademsrk
Me too. I fundamentally oppose the idea that ideas can be owned, even by oneself.
But a weird cult has developed around copyright where people think they are on the side of the little guy by defending copyright.
It's classic false consciousness of the temporarily embarrassed billionaire, except for the benefit of the blood 🐭 mouse in this case
TLDR: "we should be able to steal other people's work, or we'll go crying to daddy Trump. But DeepSeek shouldn't be able to steal from the stuff we stole, because China and open source"
Why does Sam have such a punchable face?
Good. I hope this is what happens.
Fuck these psychos. They should pay the copyright they stole with the billions they already made. Governments should protect people, MDF
As an artist, kindly get fucked ass hole. I'd like compensation for all the work of mine you stole.
"How are we supposed to win the race if we can't cheat?!"
I am good with that.
Look we may have driven Aaron Swartz to suicide for doing basically the same thing on a smaller scale, but dammit we are getting very rich of this. And, if we are getting rich, then it is okay to break the law while actively fucking over actually creative people. Trust us. We are tech bros and we know what is best for you is for us to become incredibly rich and out of touch. You need us.
In case anyone is unfamiliar, Aaron Swartz downloaded a bunch of academic journals from JSTOR. This wasn't for training AI, though. Swartz was an advocate for open access to scientific knowledge. Many papers are "open access" and yet are not readily available to the public.
Much of what he downloaded was open-access, and he had legitimate access to the system via his university affiliation. The entire case was a sham. They charged him with wire fraud, unauthorized access to a computer system, breaking and entering, and a host of other trumped-up charges, because he...opened an unlocked closet door and used an ethernet jack from there. The fucking Secret Service was involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosecution
Nothing Swartz did is anywhere close to the abuse by OpenAI, Meta, etc., who openly admit they pirated all their shit.
You're correct that their piracy was on a much more egregious scale than what Aaron did, but they don't openly admit to their piracy. Meta just argued that it isn't piracy because they didn't seed.
Edit: to be clear. I don't think that Aaron Swartz did anything wrong. Unlike the chatGPT, meta, etc.
Where are the copyright lawsuits by Nintendo and Disney when you need them lol
Then die. I don't know what else to tell you.
If your business model is predicated on breaking the law then you don't deserve to exist.
You can't send people to prison for 5 years and charge them $100,000 for downloading a movie and then turn around and let big business do it for free because they need to "train their AI model" and call one of thief but not the other...
Absolutely. But in this case the law is also shit and needs to be reformed. I still want to see Altman fail, because he's an asshole. But copyright law in its current form is awful and does hold back society.
The law isn't automatically moral.
This issue just exposes how ridiculous copyright law is and how much it needs to be changed. It exists specifically to allow companies to own, for hundreds of years, intellectual property.
It was originally intended to protect individual artists but has slowly mutated to being a tool of corporate ownership and control.
But, people would rather use this as an opportunity to dunk on companies trying to develop a new technology rather than as an object lesson in why copyright rules are ridiculous.
I don't disagree but the idea being that the law is made by supposedly moral men and that law is at least moral within the perspective and context of society at the time.
It's literally worse than piracy, since the AI companies are also trying to sell shittier versions of the works they copy from
Like selling camrips except done by multi-billion dollar companies ripping off individuals and stores are trying to put them right next to the original DVDs in the store
At the end of the day the fact that openai lost their collective shit when a Chinese company used their data and model to make their own more efficient model is all the proof I need they don't care about being fair or equitable when they get mad at people doing the exact thing they did and would aggressively oppose others using their own work to advance their own.
If artificial intelligence can be trained on stolen information, then so should be "natural" intelligence.
Oh, wait. One is owned by oligarchs raking in billions, the other just serves the plebs.
over it is then. Buh bye!
So pirating full works suddenly is fair use, or what?
Business that stole everyone's information to train a model complains that businesses can steal information to train models.
Yeah I'll pour one out for folks who promised to open-source their model and then backed out the moment the money appeared... Wankers.
Why training openai with literally millions of copyrighted works is fair use, but me downloading an episode of a series not available in any platform means years of prison?
Oh no! How will I generate a picture of Sam Altman blowing himself now!?
Photoshop, just like the rest of us.
I was thinking more of a Sam 1 and Sam 2 type situation.
Good.
Fuck Sam Altman's greed. Pay the fucking artists you're robbing.
Sounds like another way of saying "there actually isn't a profitable business in this."
But since we live in crazy world, once he gets his exemption to copyright laws for AI, someone needs to come up with a good self hosted AI toolset that makes it legal for the average person to pirate stuff at scale as well.
I mean, pirating media at scale for your own consumption can be considered "training of a neural network" as well..
First step, be a business. Second step, accept Trump's dick in your ass. Congratulations, here's your "get out of jail free" card.
Also, pirating media at scale isn't that hard to do right now anyway lol
If training an ai on copyrighted material is fair use, then piracy is archiving
I'm fine with that haha
Good, end this AI bullshit, it has little upsides and a metric fuckton of downsides for the common man
This is basically a veiled admission that OpenAI are falling behind in the very arms race they started. Good, fuck Altman. We need less ultra-corpo tech bro bullshit in prevailing technology.
God forbid you offer to PAY for access to works that people create like everyone else has to. University students have to pay out the nose for their books that they "train" on, why can't billion dollar AI companies?
What if we had taken the billions of dollars invested in AI and invested that into public education instead?
Imagine the return on investment of the information being used to train actual humans who can reason and don’t lie 60% of the time instead of using it to train a computer that is useless more than it is useful.
If everyone can 'train' themselves on copyrighted works, then I say "fair game.''
Otherwise, get fucked.
I have conflicting feelings about this whole thing. If you are selling the result of training like OpenAI does (and every other company), then I feel like it’s absolutely and clearly not fair use. It’s just theft with extra steps.
On the other hand, what about open source projects and individuals who aren’t selling or competing with the owners of the training material? I feel like that would be fair use.
What keeps me up at night is if training is never fair use, then the natural result is that AI becomes monopolized by big companies with deep pockets who can pay for an infinite amount of random content licensing, and then we are all forever at their mercy for this entire branch of technology.
The practical, socioeconomic, and ethical considerations are really complex, but all I ever see discussed are these hard-line binary stances that would only have awful corporate-empowering consequences, either because they can steal content freely or because they are the only ones that will have the resources to control the technology.
I'm fine for them to use copyrighted material, provided that everyone can do the same without reprecautions Fuck double standards. Fuck IP. People should have access to knowledge without having to pay.
PS. I know this might be an unpopular opinion
Edit: typos
On the other side, creators should be paid for their labor.
I couldn't agree more. The thing with IP is that it tends to last almost forever, thus it almost never enters public domain, at least in a man's lifetime. The result is it stifles innovation and prevents knowledge NAD entertainment to the masses. Lastly almost always, it's not the creator that benefits of it, rather than a huge corp
No amigo, it's not fair if you're profiting from it in the long run.
For Sam:
Then let it be over then.
So Deepmind is good to train on your models then right?
If AI gets to use copyrighted material for free and makes a profit off of the results, that means piracy is 1000% Legal. Excuse me while I go and download a car!!
No, stop! You wouldn't!
I would, and a house. I'm a menace!
DAMMIT ALL TO HELL!
...This must be DEI's fault.
Thank a lot Obama
I also downloaded Obama as well. Now I'm a Super Menace.
I can tell you it's not. I downloaded all the DEI documents and read them, sitting in my new house. :)
All you have to do is present credible evidence that these companies are distributing copyrighted works or a direct substitute for those copyrighted works. They have filters to specifically exclude matches though, so it doesn’t really happen.
Good. Fuck AI
Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!
What is the charge, officer? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?
Come on bro, let us pirate bro, just one more ngram of books bro
If your business model only works if you break the Law, that mean's you're just another Organised Crime group.
Technofascism on its way to legalize my 30TB trove of backups
But if you stop me from criming, how will I get better at crime!?!
Good riddance. This version of AI is just a glorified search engine anyways
And it's not even a good search engine either. It just spits out sarcastic jokes from barely up voted reddit posts.
Oops, oh well. I very much hope it's over, asshole.
Suddenly millions of people are downloading to "train their AI models".
If I'm using "AI" to generate subtitles for the "community" is ok if i have a large "datastore" of "licensable media" stored locally to work off of right?
I hope generative AI obliterates copyright. I hope that its destruction is so thorough that we either forget it ever existed or we talk about it in disgust as something that only existed in stupider times.
Okay.
It was fun while it lasted.
For someone.
I presume.
Vote pirate party.
Fuck OpenAI for stealing the hard work of millions of people
"How am I supposed to make any money if I can't steal all of my products to sell back to the world that produced them?"
Yeah, fuck that. The whole industry deserves to die.
How many pages has a human author read and written before they can produce something worth publishing? I’m pretty sure that’s not even a million pages. Why does an AI require a gazillion pages to learn, but the quality is still unimpressive? I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way we teach these models.
To be fair, that's all they have to go on. If a picture's worth a thousand words, how many pages is a lifetime (or even a childhood) of sight and sound?
That’s a good point. A human author would be influenced by life in general, not just the books.
Because an AI is not a human brain?
It's impressive how the technology have advanced in the last years. But obviously it is not a human brain.
Because humans learn how to read and interpret those pages in school. Give that book to a toddler and not much will happen other than some bite marks.
AI needs to learn the language structure, grammar, math, logic, reasoning, problem solving and much more before it can even be trained with anything useful. Humans take years to acquire those skills, AI takes more content but can do that training much faster.
Maybe it is the wrong way to train machines but for now we have not invented robot schools yet so it's the best we got.
By the way, I still think companies should be banned from training with copyrighted content and user data behind closed doors. Keep your models in public domain or get out.
The more important question is: Why can a human absorb a ton of material in their learning without anyone crying about them "stealing"? Why shouldn't the same go for AI? What's the difference? I really don't understand the common mindset here. Is it because a trained AI is used for profit?
There is a difference between me reading a book and learning from it and one of the biggest companies in the world pirating millions of books for their business. And it really gets bad when normal users are getting sued for tenthousands of dollars when they download a book or a MP3 and Meta is getting defended for doing the same thing, but in a much larger scale.
Yes, we know that copyright is broken. But if it is broken, it has to be broken for all
Absolutely. But especially because it skews the market dynamic. Copyright doesn't exist for moral reasons but financial reasons.
What you're talking about is if AI is actually inventing new work (imo, yes it is), but that's not the issue.
The issue is these models were trained on our collective knowledge & culture without permission, then sold back to us.
Unless they use only proprietary & public training data, every single one of these models should be open sourced/weighted & free for anyone to use, like libraries.
It is because a human artist is usually inspired and uses knowledge to create new art and AI is just a mediocre mimic. A human artist doesn't accidentally put six fingers on people on a regular basis. If they put fewer fingers it is intentional.
If your argument is that it depends on the quality of the output, then I definitely shouldn't be allowed to look at art or read books.
I didn't say anything about quality.
That's where I don't agree. I don't subscribe to the view that LLMs merely are "stochastic parrots".
What do you think they are if not that?
They don't have emotions, they don't have individual motivations, and don't have intent.
No. But I do think they mimick the language capacity in the human brain.
I’ve been thinking about that as well. If an author has bought 500 books, and read them, it’s obviously going to influence the books they write in the future. There’s nothing illegal about that. Then again, they did pay for the books, so I guess that makes it fine.
What if they got the books from a library? Well, they probably also paid taxes, so that makes it ok.
What if they pirated those books? In that case, the pirating part is problematic, but I don’t think anyone will sue the author for copying the style of LOTR in their own works.
Exactly!
These fuckers are the first one to send tons of lawyers whenever you republish or use any IP of them. Fuck these idiots.
Good. Fuck off.
Porque no los dos?
The ai race is over AND we abolish the copyright bullshit laws we have now?
I always felt using publicly available but copyrighted works could be ok but only if the model is publicly available as well
Oh no, not the plagiarizing machine! How are rich hacks going to feign talent now? Pay an artist for it?! Crazy!
This is exactly what social media companies have been doing for a while (it’s free, yes) they use your data to train their algorithms to squeeze more money out of people. They get a tangible and monetary benefit from our collective data. These AI companies want to train their AI on our hard work and then get monetary benefit off of it. How is this not seen as theft or even if they are not doing it just yet…how is it not seen as an attempt at theft?
How come people (not the tech savvy) are unable to see how they are being exploited? These companies are not currently working towards any UBI bills or policies in governments that I am aware of. Since they want to take our work, and use it to get rich and their investors rich why do they think they are justified in using people’s work? It just seems so slime-y.
I need a seamstress AI to take over 10 million seamstress robots so I don't have to pay 100million seamstresses for fruit of the loom underwear.... Could you tech it how to do double well and then back up at each end with some zigzags? For free? I mean everyone knows zigzag!
His personal race is over? Oooohhhh, so sorry for him.
AI is not over at all. Maybe he himself will not become the ruler of the world now. No loss.
Yeah, China sure as shit isn't going to lose sleep over a US Copyright case.
So all I need to do if I get caught torrenting a movie is say that im training an LLM for subtitles?
Why does Sam keep threatening us with a good time?
Musk has an AI project. Techbros have deliberately been sucking up to Trump. I’m pretty sure AI training will be declared fair use and copyright laws will remain the same for everybody else.
No, actually they've just finally admitted that they can't improve them any further because there's not enough training data in existence to squeeze any more demonizing returns out of.
What's wrong with the sentiment expressed in the headline? AI training is not and should not be considered fair use. Also, copyright laws are broken in the west, more so in the east.
We need a global reform of copyright. Where copyrights can (and must) be shared among all creators credited on a work. The copyright must be held by actual people, not corporations (or any other collective entity), and the copyright ends after 30 years or when the all rights holders die, whichever happens first. That copyright should start at the date of initial publication. The copyright should be nontransferable but it should be able to be licensed to any other entity only with a majority consent of all rights holders. At the expiration of the copyright the work in question should immediately enter the public domain.
And fair use should be treated similarly to how it is in the west, where it's decided on a case-by-case basis, but context and profit motive matter.
Sadly this comes down to OpenAI petitioning Trump, and expecting trump to do anything that could stop a scam like AI is pointless.
Oh no anyway.jpg
Corporations trying to profit by closing off vast tracts of human output are bumping into other corporations trying to mine it for profit.
Alright, I confess! Almost all of my training in computer programming came from copyrighted material. Put the cuffs on me!
You were trained and learned and are able to create new things.
AI poorly mimics thngs it has seen before.
The issue being raised is copyright infringement, not the quality of the results. Writers "borrow" each other's clever figures of speech all the time without payment or attribution. I'm sure I have often copypasted code without permission. AI does nothing on its own, it's always a tool used by human beings. I think the copyright argument against AI is built on a false distinction between using one tool vs another.
My larger argument is that nobody has an inherent right to control what everybody else does with some idea they've created. For many thousands of years people saw stuff and freely imitated it. Oh look, there's an "arch" - I think I'll build a building like that. Oh look, that tribe uses that root to make medicine, let's do the same thing. This process was known as "the spread of civilization" until somebody figured out that an authority structure could give people dibs on their ideas and force other people to pay to copy them. As we evolve more capabilities (like AI) I think it's time to figure out another way to reward creators without getting in the way of improvement, instead of hanging onto a "Hey, that's Mine!" mentality that does more to enrich copy producers than it does to enrich creators.
Yes, whether copyright should exist is a different discussion than how AI is violating it in a very different way than snippets being reused in different contexts as part of a new creative work.
Intentionally using a single line is very different than scooping up all the data and hitting a randomizer until it stumbles into some combination that happens to look usable. Kind of like how a single business jacking up prices is different than a monopoly jacking up all the prices.
Stripping away your carefully crafted wording, the differences fade away. "Hitting a randomizer" until usable ideas come out is an equally inaccurate description of either human creativity or AI. And again, the contention is that using AI violates copyright, not how it allegedly does that.
So the other thing with AI is the companies are not just making money on the output like an artist would. They are making bank on investors and stock market speculation that exists only because they scooped up massive amounts of copyrighted materials to create their output. It really isn't comparable to a single artist or even a collection of artists.
Again, AI doesn't do anything, any more than hammers and saws build houses. People use AI to do things. Anyway, profiting from investors and speculators without giving creators a piece of the action isn't a consequence of AI, it's how our whole system already works.
looks good
Good. If I ever published anything, I would absolutely not want it to be pirated by AI so some asshole can plagiarize it later down the line and not even cite their sources.
🤞🤞 🙏
Good, fuck "AI" fuck copyright, fuck patents, fuck proprietary closed-source software, fuck capitalism, fuck billionaires, and fuck you, Sam, in particular.
Sad to see you leave (not really, tho'), love to watch you go!
Edit: I bet if any AI developing company would stop acting and being so damned shady and would just ASK FOR PERMISSION, they'd receive a huge amount of data from all over. There are a lot of people who would like to see AGI become a real thing, but not if it's being developed by greedy and unscrupulous shitheads. As it stands now, I think the only ones who are actually doing it for the R&D and not as eye-candy to glitz away people's money for aesthetically believable nonsense are a handful of start-up-likes with (not in a condescending way) kids who've yet to have their dreams and idealism trampled.
But what data would it be?
Part of the "gobble all the data" perspective is that you need a broad corpus to be meaningfully useful. Not many people are going to give a $892 billion market cap when your model is a genius about a handful of narrow subjects that you could get deep volunteer support on.
OTOH maybe there's probably a sane business in narrow siloed (cheap and efficient and more bounded expectations) AI products: the reinvention of the "expert system" with clear guardrails, the image generator that only does seaside background landscapes but can't generate a cat to save its life, the LLM that's a prettified version of a knowledgebase search and NOTHING MORE
You've highlighted exactly why I also fundamentally disagree with the current trend of all things AI being for-profit. This should be 100% non-profit and driven purely by scientific goals, in which case using copyrighted data wouldn't even be an issue in the first place... It'd be like literally giving someone access to a public library.
Edit: but to focus on this specific instance, where we have to deal with the here-and-now, I could see them receiving, say, 60-75% of what they have now, hassle-free. At the very least, and uniformly distributed. Again, AI development isn't what irks most people, it's calling plagiarism generators and search engine fuck-ups AI and selling them back to the people who generated the databases - or, worse, working toward replacing those people entirely with LLMs! - they used for those abhorrences.
Train the AI to be factually correct instead and sell it as an easy-to-use knowledge base? Aces! Train the AI to write better code and sell it as an on-board stackoverflow Jr.? Amazing! Even having it as a mini-assistant on your phone so that you have someone to pester you to get the damned laundry out of the washing machine before it starts to stink is a neat thing, but that would require less advertising and shoving down our throats, and more accepting the fact that you can still do that with five taps and a couple of alarm entries.
Edit 2: oh, and another thing which would require a buttload of humility, but would alleviate a lot of tension would be getting it to cite and link to its sources every time! Have it be transformative enough to give you the gist without shifting into plagiarism, then send you to the source for the details!
In Spain we trained an AI using a mix of public resources available for AI training and public resources (legislation, congress sessions, etc). And the AI turned out quite good. Obviously not top of the line, but very good overall.
It was a public project not a private company.
This sounds like socialism is good for capitalists
I'll take him seriously if & when OpenAI lives up to its name.
Good.
Oh no! How could we ever live without AI?
My main takeaway is that some contrived notion of "national security" has now become an acceptable justification for business decisions in the US.
To be fair, they’re not wrong. We need to find a legal comprise that satisfies everyone
I don’t think they’re wrong in saying that if they aren’t allowed to train on copyrighted works then they will fall behind. Maybe I missed it in the article, but Japan for example has that exact law (use of copyright to train generative AI is allowed).
Personally I think we need to give them somewhat of an out by letting them do it but then taxing the fuck out of the resulting product. “You can use copyrighted works for training but then 50% of your profits are taxed”. Basically a recognition that the sum of all copyrighted works is a societal good and not just an individual copyright holders.
https://jackson.dev/post/generative-ai-and-copyright/
He's right tho. China don't care. You think the west will be able to outcompete China with such limitations?
And the end result is the same, no one was compensated and a dictatorship is running one of the most important new IT tools.
Then perish, OpenAI. If your only innovation is a legal loophole then you did nothing.
Is that a promise?
Sounds good, fuck em
What a giant load of crap.
To be fair copyright is a disease. But then so is billionaires, capitalism, business, etc.
I mean, if there's a war, and you shoot somebody, does that make you bad?
Yes and no.
I think the answer is there just do what deepseek did.
Open can suck some dick.
Ip should solely be with the creator and not the corporation that owns that creator. A lot of problems in stems is IP held hostage by the corporations and by publishing companies of research papers
It's so wild how laws just have no idea what to do with you if you just add one layer of proxy. "Nooo I'm not stealing and plagerizing, it's the AI doing it!"
Please, let it be over. Idiotic "ai"....
Arr, matey.
Over in the US, that's giving China the advantage in AI development. Won't happen.
He's afraid of losing his little empire.
OpenAI also had no clue on recreation the happy little accident that gave them chatGPT3. That's mostly because their whole thing was using a simple model and brute forcing it with more data, more power, more nodes and then even more data and power until it produced results.
As expected, this isn't sustainable. It's beyond the point of decreasing returns. But Sam here has no idea on how to fix that with much better models so goes back to the one thing he knows: more data needed, just one more terabyte bro, ignore the copyright!
And now he's blaming the Chinese into forcing him to use even more data.
Do you promise?!?!
He means development of AI in public view is over. Governments will continue without regard for copyright protections until we are all dead.
Are they listening to themselves?
Yes, please.
chatgpt is stagnant, the newest model was lackluster despite using way more resources and costing a shitload of cash, Altman is floundering and on his way out he’s going to try do some lobbying bullshit
Copyright is bullshit and honestly if it disappeared it would help small creators more than anything but openai is not a small creator and guaranteed they will lobby for only huge corps like them to get such an exception. You and I will still get sued to shit by disney or whoever for daring to make $500 off of a shitty project that used some sample or something while meta and openai get free reign to steal the entirety of humanity’s creative output with no recompense
Apparantly their trying to get Deepseek banned again, really doesn't like competition this guy.
Perhaps this is just a problem with the way the model works. Always requiring new data and unable to use current data, to ponder and expand upon while making new connections about ideas that influenced the author… LLM’s are a smoke and mirrors show, not a real intelligence.
🏴☠️
National security my ass. More like his time span to show more dumb "achievements" while getting richer depends on it and nothing else
Many of you are completely two-faced on copyright laws.
I dont wanna be mean but I always thought this guy had a weird face
Race over, eh? Welp, see ya later!
AI always been about using stolen stuff
Maybe as a consumer product but governments will still want it
So, did we win?
fucking thank goodness
So what Altman is saying here is that without the low hanging fruit of human generated training data, the AI race is over.
He's either full of shit or this AI bubble is about to burst.
As far as the ai industry has already broken copyright laws. It will not be actually intelligent for a long time. Just like crypto this seems like a global scam that has squandered resources for a dream of a free workforce. Instead of working together to try and create an ai there are lots of technology companies doing the same ineffective bull 🤔
The LLM approach is not likely to actually provide a way forward. It can’t tell crap from good, only deals in information that exists and not generate new useful knowledge and is prohibitively expensive. A failure just rolling along.
Time to sail the high seas.
yeah thats crazy
Stop the count!
They are US based right?
So they literally do whatever they want anyway regardless of what any law might say.
Idk about that, but openai is probably over
In the early 80s I used to have fantasies about having a foster
robotandroid that my family was teaching how to be a person. Oh the amusing mix-ups we got into! We could just do that. Train on experiential reality instead of on the dim cultural reflection of reality.Edit: "robot" means "slave"
I mean if they pay for it like everyone else does I don't think it is a problem. Yes it will cost you billions and billions to do it correctly, but then you basically have the smartest creature on earth (that we know of) and you can replicate/improve on it in perpetuity. We still will have to pay you licensing fees to use it in our daily lives, so you will be making those billions back.
Now I would say let them use anything that is old and freeware, textbooks, etc. government owned stuff - we sponsored it with our learning, taxes - so we get a percentage in all AI companies. Humanity gets a 51% stake in any AI business using humanity's knowledge, so we are then free to vote on how the tech is being used and we have a controlling share, also whatever price is set, we get half of it back in taxes at the end of the year. The more you use it the more you pay and the more you get back.
They're unprofitable as it is already. They're not going to be able to generate enough upfront capital to buy and then enclose all of humanity's previous works to then sell it back to us. I also think it would be heinous that they could enclose and exploit our commons in this manner. It belongs to all of us. Sure train it and use it, but also release it open (or the gov can confiscate it, fine with that as well). Anything but allowing those rat-snakes to keep it all for themselves.
They can be even more unprofitable like Amazon was for years and years - and now they print money. I don't think it's a bad model, but it's gonna come down to just a couple governments/companies having powerful AIs where we are not needed anymore - so if it's privately owned it would spell doom for the human species or at least a huge portion of it, potential enslavement as well.
If it costs billions and billions, then only a handful of companies can afford to build an AI and they now have a monopoly on a technology that will eventually replace a chunk of the workforce. It would basically be giving our economy to Google.
Yep exactly, that's why you make it people owned. What is your alternative ? They do have companies/governments that can afford it even at these steep prices.
The owners of the copyrighted works should be paid in perpetuity too though, since part of their work goes into everything the AI spits out.
I don't see why I'm downvoted for this, but I don't agree with this opinion - it's like teaching a human being. If you buy everything once it's still a hell of a bill - we are talking all books, all movies, all games, all software, all memes, all things - 1 of each is still trillions if you legally want to train your new thing on it.
But a human can't look at a painting for a millisecond and spit out an exact replica in the next. A human can't listen to the collected works of a musical artist and instantly improvise infinite sound-a-like songs based on complex prompts. A human can't read every scientific article on the Internet in a few seconds and regurgitate any and every tiny trivial detail on demand in the literal blink of an eye. A human being has a soul. Most do anyway.
For the record, I didn't downvote you, but I'm guessing others did because you don't seem to see how AI so obviously devalues the beautiful and brilliant efforts of the human spirit to build and sustain our cultures, our societies, our civilizations, our species, our very world. In the capitalist hellscape that we currently suffer in, that kind of devaluing ought to be criminal.
Not targetting you specifically, but I guess AI is going to be a hard subject in the future.
Think of it as an expert in all other areas and you spend a year teaching it to be a better expert and so on. It's just humanity's digital baby that we are teaching based on our current knowledge, technology, art, values, morals, etc. - and it's just much better than you or me at learning so it's becoming an expert in everything, thus as you expect from an expert it's able to draw, it's able to replicate style's of music, it's able to think through complex math/physics/chem/biology problems as a human expert might be able to. Yet it has fatal flaws that need fixing, thus needs better training methods and more time - they are saying 2029 for AGI which is the first step. At that point it won't be up to you or me to decide as it will be a new living form that we will have to acknowledge and let it decide for itself what it wants or doesn't want to do.
I guess my point is it seems like it's devaluing stuff, but is in fact elevating everything that we were, we are and will be - that's why I'm saying it should be owned by all of us, we should all get the benefits. If a painter wants to draw something, they can use AI to draw faster, with more variations at a speed impossible before, you can make new styles, you can make it use just your own style, you save time and can create more complex works because of that. Real world paintings made by humans the old school way will always have a place, my thoughts are that they will even gain an exclusive status and be worth even more with proof of creation.
Not saying things are not bad right now, but what if AI is the path forward, like technology always has been - what if it helps cure all diseases past and future, what if it figures out how to make us immortal, what if we can travel instantenously from 1 place in the universe to another, imagine the possibilities that it will open to us. I think it's inevitable really.
Fucking hellscape
Okay, bye!
We need to annect Austria, Czechoslovak Republic and Poland otherwise China will do it first.
Hail Hydra
Annex
thank you
Annex
Sorry to say, but he's right. For AI to truly flourish in the West, it needs access to all previously human made information and media.
Strange that no one mentioned openai making money off copyrighted works.
Let's say I write a book.
If I don't want people copying it, people shouldn't be copying it. I don't care if it's been 500 years. It's my book.
This is a weird thread. Lots of people for artists losing control of their creations quickly while simultaneously against artist creations being used by others without consent. Just my perspective but why should artists lose control of their own creations at all? The problem in copyright is tech companies doing patent thickets; not artists.
Even artistic creations held by corporations. Waiting for Marvel stuff to hit public domain to publish a bunch of Marvel novels since they can't protect their creations any more? Why is that acceptable? If someone creates something and doesn't want it stolen, I don't give a fuck what the law says, stealing it is theft. The thief should instead be using Marvel stuff as inspiration as they make their own universe; not just waiting an amount of time before stealing someone else's creation without consent. It isn't holding progress back at all to make novel artistic creations instead of steal others. Art = very different from tech.
when I publish a book, to steal it is consenting to be Luigi'd; no matter how long ago it came out.
I find it odd that Lemmy users are so adverse to tech.