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Can't agree more. These AI systems have been built on the back of free labor for decades. We will look back on this and wonder how we essentially subsidized these behemoth corporations, then allowed them to extract subscription fees back from the very people it took the labor from.

Don't get me wrong, there are genuine innovations in AI and ML. But, on the same token, you can't have ChatGPT without content.

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> These AI systems have been built on the back of free labor for decades.

Do you repay publishers for information you’ve summarized or new insights you’ve gained after consuming their content? How is it different when AI does the same thing?

You can't really compare machines with people when it comes to scale.

You can scale the volume of work for a machine in a way that would be impossible with people. No amount of Mechanical Turks could make content at the rate that Generative AI systems like ChatGPT, Dall-E, etc. can.

Treating content scraped from an original source without consent as fair use for training a machine somehow seems wrong. Especially since this AI system is then used to make money and that content is essential to its ability to do so, though without giving anything back to the original content creators.

Seems natural that any law regarding AI copyright should take these matters into account.

Yes. They get a subscription fee or are paid by advertising. No one pays to advertise to an AI.

There are people who still don't block ads?

Well yes or there would be nothing to block.

I paid for the newspaper, book copy or museum visit from which I learnt and got inspired. And like me, million of people did over the years. And yes, I also pirated part of that content as well.

Repay everyone in the form of UBI, tax the AI!!!

Are you implying normal humans get access to the data used in training GPts for free? Where can I read all those books for free, from an offline copy and without ads?

False equivalence. You stated how its different in the premise on top of that

>These AI systems have been built on the back of free labor for decades.

In practical terms, is that different from Google becoming a trillion-dollar company from its search offering?

Indexing content provides a useful service that content owners benefit from, too, so for a long time, there was definitely a mutual understanding between Google and site owners. I think the relationship has soured, somewhat coincidentally, in large part due to the way that Google has started to push against actually linking to sites, like by trying to provide inline answers and using AMP caches to avoid actually dropping the user out of Google's Search UI.

Personally, I think society is built on top of unspoken agreements that couldn't really be meaningfully codified, but then immensely harmed by those who exploit the resulting relationships that formed as a result of said unspoken agreements. The Internet's openness was once its biggest asset, but it feels like it quickly became the biggest liability almost overnight.

>Indexing content provides a useful service that content owners benefit from

I'm not sure about that. The Google Index put a lot of existing content creators out of business, like local newspapers. They certainly did not see this great benefit of a Google index. Even today, given the insanely low ad rates, because it's impossible to generate income from public content (hence the rise of paywalled subscription services) no content creator is making any money - and yet, Google is still worth a trillion dollars. And yes, there's also the fact that in the last decade or so, Google has started side-stepping the content providers by simply providing 'inline answers' and 'AMP caches'

So no, I don't see much difference between Generative AI and your 'traditional' aggregation services.

> The Google Index put a lot of existing content creators out of business, like local newspapers. They certainly did not see this great benefit of a Google index.

I dunno why you ignored the entire part of my comment wherein I describe the gradual fallout with Google, but frankly it's difficult to even begin with how infuriatingly wrong this line of thinking is.

So basically, you're saying that local newspapers, for example, did not see some great benefit from the Google search index. In fact, they're being killed by it! Shivers.

But wait a minute. How? How is Google killing the websites that its indexing? Is it because they're causing their hosting bills to skyrocket through negligent web crawling? Doesn't seem to be. Is it because they're charging websites through the nose to be listed? No, being listed in Google is free... Yeah, the reason why Google is "killing" local newspapers is simply local newspapers don't make as much money from Google traffic as they used to.

Forget about how Google is benefiting from local newspapers without giving back to them as much. That is happening, but there is a crucial and specific detail in your argument that needs to be scrutinized. If websites simply saw no benefit from being indexed by search engines, uhm, They Simply would choose to not be indexed in search engines. You can choose to do that. But they won't, because the problem isn't actually that Google is killing them. That's just the soppy rhetoric used to sell asinine ideas like the Link Tax wherein you will be billed for providing a hyperlink to a website.

The point I was going on about in my original comment was in fact that search indices like Google were in fact, always a give-and-take operation. Google benefits from having content in the index, websites benefit from the traffic they get from Google. The difference today is that Google does work harder to keep you off of the actual target website by adding features like info boxes containing snippets and again, AMP caches. However, note that these features don't really increase the "take": Google is taking exactly the same thing it always did, it's indexing your web sites and presenting its information in a transformed format on theirs. What it's giving, however, in terms of traffic to websites, has decreased over time.

Meanwhile, generative AI is a take operation. Certainly both search engines and generative AI models provide utility to the users of their respective services, but in case of generative AI models, it's only in service of the owners of the model, who give essentially nothing back, not credit, not a link, and certainly not revenue sharing of any kind.

This isn't in defense of Google's practices by any means: Like I said, they upset the balance that was in place from unspoken agreements. However, it definitely is in defense of the truth, and the truth is a phrase like "Google kills local newspapers" is bullshit, and if it wasn't, they'd all be running away from the Google index as fast as possible. Instead, many of them closely follow the latest SEO tricks, still.

And I hate this narrative anyways, because if organic Google traffic and Google Adsense was the only thing funding local newspapers, they were never sustainable by any measure in the first place.

Yeah, I think, even at the most facial level, the output from an LLM or visual generative model is nothing like what you get as a search result, which is really only an index.

Maybe you can provide us with an argument as to why you think it's so obvious that they are similar?

Key differences are in crediting sources and where the revenue comes from:

- Google became a trillion-dollar company off advertising along side the search offering - the search offering itself linked back to sources and was fully available for $0.

- OpenAI is opaque with crediting sources and currently charges $20/mn for better output .

>In practical terms, is that different from Google becoming a trillion-dollar company from its search offering?

Google directs people to the people that created content and their platforms, allowing them to profit off of their labor.

ChatGPT completely obscures the source.

Simple enough, it seems.

Google is unique from an internet platform perspective in the sense that the value of companies built on the platform are as big, or bigger than Google itself (probably, rough math here)

Yes, Google has captured massive value, but they've also generated massive amounts of value for companies (including startups!).

Can the same be said for OpenAI?

If they live up to their non-profit mission, I think it could.

But it's not clear that it will.

Google has suffered years of lawsuits that IIRC are still unresolved as a result of doing what OpenAI is doing (scraping the entire internet and using the content in their products).

That is (was) the issue when Google started providing answers along with the search results, answers which were sourced from somewhere else and whose author is not Google.

I don't think they should get away with that as it violates all of the safe harbor clauses from copyright law.

So, to answer your question, they're both doing bad things.

In a just world, royalties would be paid to those whose content AIs were trained on.

In reality, the most we'll likely see is a few people who successfully sue for their small piece of the pie, while the big companies carry on like nothing happened - further accelerating the transfer of wealth right to the top.

In a just world, publishers would be able to opt-out of AI training, and AI companies would have to respect this. Then, if they still want the material, they can approach publishers and buy the content. (Smaller publishers might make a "content pool" so they don't have to negotiate individually)

(This is how current search engines work, btw.. and that's why no one complains about them crawling content)

I'd go even further and say all content is by default "opted-out" from training unless explicitly allowed.

In that just world, the royalties would be pennies, just as is the case with Spotify. Creators would then endlessly complain that their content isn't worth more than it is.

It's fine if we shift to that model. The content creators won't be well compensated in that world, because their individual pieces of content are not in fact particularly valuable. It's a delusion that they are. What they really want is an artificially inflated over-compensation for their share (and if everyone got that, it wouldn't work at all).

And exactly as with Spotify, even with the payouts, the big corporation (OpenAI) will be the valuable thing in the end.

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