Is there any difference between a human watching 1000 videos on a topic and producing content based on that information, and a machine learning model? If it only creates original work, what does it matter?
Selling human organs will never be the same as selling beef liver, while the difference between a human's liver and a cow's is much smaller than the difference between your brain and a A100 tensor core.
People produce videos hoping or expecting to be monetized. People who monetize videos (by advertising or sponsoring) do so hoping for the audience to buy some product or service. People who host videos do so expecting to be paid by the monetizing people. That's how the current economic model for ad-supported video works.
A machine learning model is not an economic actor[1]. It's not going to go out and buy a flat wallet or a new set of headphones or whatever else is being advertised on stream. So the current economic model under which that content produced (which is predicated on the assumption that the audience is human) totally falls apart if the audience is an ML model.
[1] yet. And even when they routinely can take part in economic transactions they aren't the audience the advertisers are paying to reach.
Gen-AI is an empowering technology for the masses and easy to run locally. And the providers are in a race to the bottom on pricing.
(Whether they should be able to hike drug prices by 100% overnight or sell drugs with insane markups is a separate question.)
OpenAI is charging a _really_ high monthly fee for ChatGPT, and it’s quite popular. It’s very limited - there’s no way the cost incurred for usage is near that. Obviously their costs include the R&D that has already happened, but I still think it’s priced way over that.
Drug manufacturers are famously making money hand over fist. Patients aren’t their customers. Insurance companies are. They are surely gouging insurance companies to their fullest capacity.
And big LLM providers will certainly try, but they have competition now, all 3 tied up at roughly the same level. And then there is competition from open models that can handle 50% of what big models do.
So they can only set a high price for very advanced/critical tasks, where usage will be much lower.
With every new technology, there needs to be legislation and judicial rulings to determine the exact definition of things so that the best people can offer you is speculation or their interpretation. The quality of those interpretations will vary by person; I suspect most will be relatively uninformed.
One important factor to consider is the terms of use of the websites from which the data is obtained. For example, YouTube's terms clearly state that content may only be used for personal, non-commercial purposes.
Additionally, the current generation of models does not derive core aspects of knowledge or build world models; instead, they compress vast amounts of data and use that information to generate content. This process likely involves storing copyrighted information, which may violate copyright law.