OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use
National security hinges on unfettered access to AI training data, OpenAI says.
But I can't pirate copyrighted materials to "train" my own real intelligence.
Now you get why we were all told to hate AI. It's a patriot act for copywrite and IP laws. We should be able too. But that isn't where our discussions were steered was it
True!
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?
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.
Bro, what? Some books take more than 5 years to write and you want their authors to only have authorship of it for 5 years? Wtf. I have published books that are a dozen years old and I'm in my mid-30s. This is an insane take.
I agree that copyright is far too long, but at 5 years there's hardly incentive to produce. You could write a novel and have it only starting to get popular after 5 years.
You don't have to stop selling when it becomes public domain, people sell books, movies, music, etc that are all in the public domain and people choose it over free versions all the time because of convenience, patroning arts, etc.
Good.
Fuck Sam Altman's greed. Pay the fucking artists you're robbing.
"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.
Sounds like you are describing the orange baboon in the white house.
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.
But you have to pay humans, and give them bathroom breaks, and allow them time off work to spend with their loved ones. Where's the profit in that? Surely it's more clever and efficient to shovel time and money into replacing something that will never be able to practically develop beyond current human understanding. After all, we're living in the golden age of humanity and history has ended! No new knowledge will ever be made so let's just make machines that regurgitate our infallible and complete knowledge.
Where are the copyright lawsuits by Nintendo and Disney when you need them lol
So pirating full works for commercial use suddenly is "fair use", or what? Lets see what e.g. Disney says about this.
If your business model only works if you break the Law, that mean's you're just another Organised Crime group.
Organized crime exists to make money; the way OpenAI is burning through it, they're more Disorganized Crime
National security my ass. More like his time span to show more dumb "achievements" while getting richer depends on it and nothing else
So pirating full works suddenly is fair use, or what?
Only if you're doing it to learn, I guess
Wait until all those expensive scientific journals hear about this
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?
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.
No, taxes implies a monopoly on the training data. The government profits. The rights holders get nothing back.
If private data is deemed public for AI training then the results of that training (code+weights+source list) should also be deemed public.
Slave owners might go broke after abolition? 😂
I'm going to have to remember this
Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!
What is the charge, officer? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?
If everyone can 'train' themselves on copyrighted works, then I say "fair game.''
Otherwise, get fucked.
Suddenly millions of people are downloading to "train their AI models".
Come on bro, let us pirate bro, just one more ngram of books bro
Why does Sam keep threatening us with a good time?
Training that AI is absolutely fair use.
Selling that AI service that was trained on copyrighted material is absolutely not fair use.
Agreed... although I would go a step further and say distributing the LLM model or the results of use (even if done without cost) is not fair use, as the training materials weren't licensed.
Ultimatelly it's "Doing Research that advances knowledge for everybody" that should be allowed free use of copyrighted materials, whils activities for direct or indirect commercial gains (included Research whose results are Patented and then licensed for a fee) should not, IMHO.
This sounds like socialism is good for capitalists
Fine by me. Can it be over today?
I'll get the champagne for us and tissues for Sam.
Unfortunately, the tissues have a 1000% tarrif. Perhaps sandpaper will do?
Shit, save your $$$ and get some GPUs since the market would crash.
I'll bring the meth
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.
couldnt' have said it better...the irony...
For Sam:
Then perish, OpenAI. If your only innovation is a legal loophole then you did nothing.
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.
Thing is that copywrite did serve a purpose and was for like 20 years before disney got it extended to the nth degree. The idea was the authors had a chance to make money but were expected to be prolific enough to have more writings by the time 20 years was over. I would like to see with patents that once you get one you have a limited time to go to market. Maybe 10 years and if you product is ever not available for purchase (at a cost equivalent to the average cost accounted for inflation or something) you lose the patent so others can produce it. So like stop making an attachment for a product and now anyone can.
"Thing is, land ownership also served a purpose before lord's/landlord's/capitalists decided to expand it to the point of controlling and dictating the lives of serfs/renters/workers. "
Creation's are not that of only the individual creator, they come from a common progress, culture, and history. When individual creator's copyright their works and their works become a major part of common culture they slice up culture for themselves, dictating how it may be used against the wishes of the masses. Desiring this makes them unworthy of having any cultural control IMO. They become just as much of an authoritarian as a lord, landlord, or capitalist.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that copyright also harms individual creators once culture has been carved up: Producing brand new stories inevitably are in some way derivative of previous existing works so because they are locked out of the existing IP unless they sign a deal with the devil they're usually doomed to failure due to no ability to have a grip on cultural relevance.
Now, desiring the ability to make a living being an individual creator? That's completely reasonable. Copyright is not the solution however.
The problem with these systems is that the more they are bureaucratized and legalized, the more publishing houses and attorney's offices will ultimately dictate the flow of lending and revenue. Ideally, copywrite is as straighforward as submitting a copy of your book to the Library of Congress and getting a big "Don't plagiarize this" stamp on it, such that works can't be lifted straight from one author by another. But because there's all sorts of shades of gray - were Dan Brown and JK Rowling ripping off the core conceits of their works, or were religious murder thrillers and YA wizard high school books simply done to death by the time they went mainstream? - a lot of what constitutes plagarism really boils down to whether or not you can afford extensive litigation.
And that's before you get into the industrialization of ghostwriters that end up supporting "prolific" writers like Danielle Steele or Brian Sanderson or R.L. Stein. There's no real legal protection for staff writers, editors, and the like. The closest we've got is the WGA, and that's more exclusive to Hollywood.
Interesting take. I'm not opposed, but I feel like the necessary reverse engineering skill base won't ramp up enough to deal with SAS and holomorphic encryption. So, in a world without copyright, you might be able to analog hole whatever non-interactibe media you want, but software piracy will be rendered impossible at the end of the escalation of hostilities.
Copyright is an unnatural, authoritarian-imposed monopoly. I doubt it will last forever.
I find that very unlikely to happen. If AI is accepted as fair use by the legal system, then that means they have a motive to keep copyright as restrictive as possible; it protects their work but allows them to use every one else's. If you hate copyright law (and you should) AI is probably your enemy, not your ally.
I suspect your assessment is at best subconsciously biased and at worst in bad faith. You'll need to elaborate on the mechanism of how they'd "keep copyright as restrictive as possible" in a world where it is not possible to copyright AI generated works.
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 🤔
Oh yes. Deepseek can quote from copyright sources. So can openAI models, but they are programmed not to.
Facebook trained on the torrent of Annas archive.
The copyright horse has left the stable.
AI always been about using stolen stuff
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!
Fair use doesn't mean shit if you're a pirate.
Arr, matey.
So Deepmind is good to train on your models then right?
Oh, so now you're just going to surrender our precious natural resources to the Imperialist Chinese?!
Guys, I think we've got a Wumao over here. Someone get what's left of the FBI to arrest him and show his ass the fucking door.
My main takeaway is that some contrived notion of "national security" has now become an acceptable justification for business decisions in the US.
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
I mean, if they are allowed to go forward then we should be allowed to freely pirate as well.
Don't worry: the law will be very carefully crafted so that it will be legal only if they do it, not us.
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".
If training an ai on copyrighted material is fair use, then piracy is archiving
I'm fine with that haha
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.
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!
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
The federal prosecution involved what was characterized by numerous critics (such as former Nixon White House counsel John Dean) as an "overcharging" 13-count indictment and "overzealous", "Nixonian" prosecution for alleged computer crimes, brought by then U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz.
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.
Sadly this comes down to OpenAI petitioning Trump, and expecting trump to do anything that could stop a scam like AI is pointless.
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.
🌏👨🚀🔫👨🚀🌌
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.
He means development of AI in public view is over. Governments will continue without regard for copyright protections until we are all dead.
So all I need to do if I get caught torrenting a movie is say that im training an LLM for subtitles?
🤞🤞 🙏
Race over, eh? Welp, see ya later!
Technofascism on its way to legalize my 30TB trove of backups
Good. Fuck off.
Idk about that, but openai is probably over
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.
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.
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)
That's like calling stealing from shops essential for my existence and it would be "over" for me if they stop me.
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.
That's a good litmus test. If asking/paying artists to train your AI destroys your business model, maybe you're the arsehole. ;)
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!
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.
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
Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
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.
Copyright has not, was not intended to, and does not currently, pay artists.
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, it means that copyrights should not exist in the first place.