A New York Times copyright lawsuit could kill OpenAI
vox.com
A New York Times copyright lawsuit could kill OpenAI::A list of authors and entertainers are also suing the tech company for damages that could total in the billions.
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I always say this when this comes up because I really believe it's the right solution - any generative AI built with unlicensed and/or public works should then be free for the public to use.
If they want to charge for access that's fine but they should have to go about securing legal rights first. If that's impossible, they should worry about profits some other way like maybe add-ons such as internet connected AI and so forth.
There's plenty of money to be made providing infrastructure. Lots of companies make a ton of money providing infrastructure for open source projects.
On another note, why is open AI even called "open"?
It's because of the implication...
Not really how it works these days. Look at Uber and Lime/Bird scooters. They basically would just show up to a city and say the hell with the law we are starting our business here. We just call it disruptive technology
Unfortunately true, and the long arm of the law, at least in the business world, isn't really that long. Would love to see some monopoly busting to scare a few of these big companies into shape.
What is unlicensed work? Copyrighted content will not have a licence agreement but this doesn't mean you can freely infringe on copyright law.
By unlicensed I mean works that haven't been licensed IE anything being used without permission or some other right
Stuff lile public domain books, I guess, like alice in wonderland, and cc0 content
Right: public works are content in the public domain where the copyright has expired and Creative Commons licenced content is, well, licenced.
That goes against the fundamental idea of something being unlicensed, meaning there are no repercussions from using the content.
I think what you mean already exists: open source licenses. Some open source licenses stipulate that the material is free, can be modified, etc. and you can do whatever you want with it, but only on the condition that whatever you create is under the same open source license.
Ugh I see what you mean - no I mean unlicensed as in 'they didn't bother to license copyrighted works' and public as in 'stuff they scraped from Reddit, Twitter, and etc. without permission from anyone'.
Ah gotcha.
Running AI isn't free, and AI calculations pollute like a motherfucker
This isn't me saying you're wrong on an ethical or judicial standpoint, because on those I agree. It's just that, on a practical level considerations have to be made.
For me, those considerations alone (and a ton of other considerations such as digital slavery, child porn etc) make me just want to pull the plug already.
AI was fun. It's a dumb idea for dumb buzzword spewing silicon valley ghouls. Pull the plug and be done with it.
The thing is that those models aren't even open source, if it was then you could argue that openai's business model is renting processing power. Except they're not so their business model is effectively selling models trained on copyrighted data
Plus, they built the whole thing on the basis of "research purposes" when in reality from the very start they intended to use this as a business above all else. But tax benefits, copyright leniency etcetera were used liberally because 'it's just research'.
And then keeping it closed source. The whole thing is a typical silicon valley scam where they will use whatever they can get their grubby little hands on, and when the product is finally here, they make sure to throw it into the world with such a force that legislators can't even respond adequately. That's how they make sure that there will be no legislation on if the whole thing is even legal or ethical to begin with, but merely to keep it contained. From then on, they can just keep everything in courts indefinitely while the product festers like a cancer.
It's the same thing with blockchains basically.
Also, again, digital slavery being used to 'train' models and child porn being used to train them because the web scrapers they used can't and won't discern whatever shit they rake up into the garbled pile of other people's works.
Nice idea but how do you propose they pay for the billions of dollars it costs to train and then run said model?
Then don't do it. Simple as that.
This is why we can't have nice things
If we didn't live under an economic system where creatives need to sell their works to make a living or even just survive, there wouldn't be an issue. What OpenAI is doing is little different than any other worker exploitation, however. They are taking the fruits of the labor of others, without compensation of any kind, then using it to effectively destroy their livelihoods.
Few, if any, of the benefits of technological innovation related to LLMs or related tech is improving things for anyone but the already ultra-wealthy. That is the actual reason that we can't have nice things; the greedy being obsessed with taking and taking while giving less than nothing back in return.
Just like noone is entitled to own a business that can't afford to pay a living wage, OpenAI is not entitled to run a business aimed at building tools to destroy the livelihoods of countless thousands, if not millions, of creatives by building their tools out of stolen works.
I say this as one who is in support of trying to create actual AGI and potentially "uplift" species, making humanity less lonely. I think OpenAI doesn't have what it takes and is nothing more than another scam to rob workers of the value of their labor.
This is the wrong way around. The NYT wants money for the use of its "intellectual property". This is about money for property owners. When building rents go up, you wouldn't expect construction workers to benefit, right?
In fact, more money for property owners means that workers lose out, because where else is the money going to come from? (well, "money")
AI, like all previous forms of automation, allows us to produce more and better goods and services with the same amount of labor. On average, society becomes richer. Whether these gains should go to the rich, or be more evenly distributed, is a choice that we, as a society, make. It's a matter of law, not technology.
The NYT lawsuit is about sending these gains to the rich. The NYT has already made its money from its articles. The authors were paid, in full, and will not get any more money. Giving money to these property owners will not make society any richer. It just moves wealth to property owners for being property owners. It's about more money for the rich.
If OpenAI has to pay these property owners for no additional labor, then it will eventually have to increase subscription fees to balance the cash flow. People, who pay a subscription, probably feel that it benefits them, whether they use it for creative writing, programming, or entertainment. They must feel that the benefit is worth, at least, that much in terms of money.
So, the subscription fees represent a part of the gains to society. If a part of these subscription fees is paid to property owners, who did not contribute anything, then that means that this part of the social gains is funneled to property owners, IE mainly the ultra-rich, simply for being owners/ultra-rich.
Would you, after devoting full years of your adult life to the unpaid work of learning the requisite advanced math and computer science needed to develop such a model, like to spend years more of your life to develop a generative AI model without compensation? Within the US, it is legal to use public text for commercial purposes without any need to obtain a permit. Developers of such models deserve to be paid, just like any other workers, and that doesn't happen unless either we make AI a utility (or something similar) and funnel tax dollars into it or the company charges for the product so it can pay its employees.
I wholeheartedly agree that AI shouldn't be trained on copyrighted, private, or any other works outside of the public domain. I think that OpenAI's use of nonpublic material was illegal and unethical, and that they should be legally obligated to scrap their entire model and train another one from legal material. But developers deserve to be paid for their labor and time, and that requires the company that employs them to make money somehow.
No. I wouldn't want to write a kernel from scratch for free either. But Linus Torvalds did. He even found a way to monetize it without breaking any laws.
then openai should close its doors