Google says AI systems should be able to mine publishers’ work unless companies opt out, turning copyright law on its head
theguardian.com
In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
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To be honest I'm fine with it in isolation, copyright is bullshit and the internet is a quasi-socialist utopia where information (an infinitely-copyable resource which thus has infinite supply and 0 value under capitalist economics) is free and humanity can collaborate as a species. The problem becomes that companies like Google are parasites that take and don't give back, or even make life actively worse for everyone else. The demand for compensation isn't so much because people deserve compensation for IP per se, it's an implicit understanding of the inherent unfairness of Google claiming ownership of other people's information while hoarding it and the wealth it generates with no compensation for the people who actually made that wealth. "If you're going to steal from us, at least pay us a fraction of the wealth like a normal capitalist".
If they made the models open source then it'd at least be debatable, though still suss since there's a huge push for companies to replace all cognitive labor with AI whether or not it's even ready for that (which itself is only a problem insofar as people need to work to live, professionally created media is art insofar as humans make it for a purpose but corporations only care about it as media/content so AI fits the bill perfectly). Corporations are artificial metaintelligences with misaligned terminal goals so this is a match made in superhell. There's a nonzero chance corporations might actually replace all human employees and even shareholders and just become their own version of skynet.
Really what I'm saying is we should eat the rich, burn down the googleplex, and take back the means of production.
Or, if it was some non-profit doing the work for the good of everyone :')
If only there were some kind of open AI research lab lmao. In all seriousness Anthropic is pretty close to that, though it appears to be a public benefit corporation rather than a nonprofit. Luckily the open source community in general is really picking up the slack even without a centralized organization, I wouldn't be surprised if we get something like the Linux Foundation eventually.
Okay so I took back the means of production but it says it's a subscription basis now
That's late-stage capitalism for you – even revolution comes with a subscription fee
Probably shoulda read the Revolution TOS before clicking "I Agree".