OpenAI Pleads It Can't Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free
futurism.com
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What they could have done was stayed as an open research org when the tech started to work, and focused on sample efficiency and cultivating copyright free data sets. But they were too impatient to commercialize.
Whoops.
I don’t actually think intellectual property restrictions are good, but I don’t want a world where small creators have their rights stomped on by multi billion dollar corporations. Either we have copyright or we don’t, but unless OpenAI is also going to give up their copyrights this seems deeply unfair.
It would be unsurprising to me if OpenAI directly purchased copyright holding firms for the purpose of acquiring access rights to their material.
First, it may not even be a thing in some countries.
Second, I can't upload the bee movie on Youtube for free and claim fair use. One key consideration in fair use is whether your use of the copyright work competes with the author. It's why you can take a screenshot of a GUI (which is copyrightable) without worries since nobody is going to be like "I don't need to purchase Affinity Photo because I found a screenshot on the Internet for free." In the case of AI, several whole classes of artists are vehemently and justifiably complaining that it will take their jobs.
It would be like saying photobashing is fair use, or collages are fair use.
It doesn't matter as long as it's a thing in the country where the training occurs.
We ban, embargos and tax countries for political reasons. Human right violation , copyright disregard or tax evasion ? Free business should be tall free !
Carve-outs used for the social good would be fine with me
I'm not sure OpenAI offering a service for profit falls into that category.
OpenAI are building a product to offer to the public for profit.
If I employ 10,000 humans to read books and provide summaries or texts "inspired by" those books, I need to pay for the copies of the books those humans read.
So was google books.
>If I employ 10,000 humans to read books and provide summaries or texts "inspired by" those books, I need to pay for the copies of the books those humans read.
IANAL, but that would be perfectly legal. Summaries aren't copyrightable, and if you can acquire the book free but legally (eg. library, borrowing from a friend, buying it from a store and then returning it), there's nothing the publisher can do.
It's difficult to argue that, for instance, training a model on all of Frank Miller's work then prompting it to generate comic art in Frank Miller's style then selling that is fair use.
Even if you want to argue that fair use didn't apply to Google, it clearly applies far less to what AI is used for.
It's _copy_right. If reproducing verbatim snippets was "transformative" enough to fall under fair use, I don't see why producing whole new books would not count as "transformative" enough. Copyright is a regime to grant monopoly over a specific work, it's not a regime to prevent competition from others in general.
If Google was selling brand new books created only by taking snippets from other books, that would also fall under fair use?
And in my opinion (which is unfortunately more controversial than I think it should be) what LLMs do is far more akin to tracing than inspired creative expression. And I think intent is relevant here. Someone using an LLM to create a product in Frank Miller's style, trained on Frank Miller's work, isn't merely trying to create something inspired by his style, so much as create a Frank Miller product without having to pay Frank Miller.
"trouble" of what nature? You'd probably face more social consequences than legal.
In the case of LLM training, it's for the same purpose as the source material -- to generate code, or writing, or photographs, etc. Not only that, but in several instances it's been shown to reproduce source material, which is either derivative work or straight copying, depending.
They're different situations.
If it's used in a reference/"inspiration" capacity (as opposed to verbatim copying), I doubt the rightsholder have anything to stand on here. Sure, their works might have been used to make other competing works, but all art is derivative, and I don't see why it would be legal for a human artist to "train" on past works of art but not AI.
Alleging that AI models can reproduce some works verbatim is probably the stronger argument, but AFAIK you have to coax them pretty hard to do so, and therefore AI companies might be able to argue they're tools like photocopiers or such. Likewise, you can probably extract an entire book off google books by bruteforcing common ngrams to get the entire book, but google wouldn't be held liable for that.
The "all art is derivative" line is essentially something people try to convince others of to justify breaking copyright law. It's not grounded in reality or law. It devalues creative work by implying the machine, with no lived experiences, is doing the same thing. And it's also completely wrong about what the specific term derivative work actually means in the context of copyright.
Derivative works deal in specific. If your LLM reproduces a substantial portion of the story beats from Jurassic Park, you can bet it'd wind up in court. If it reuses identifiable characters, that is usually gonna be derivative unless it can otherwise qualify under an exemption.
"But fanfic, fanart, etc." Is a common counterpoint but misses the commerce aspect of it. Here Open AI and similar are offering paid services based upon harvesting all of this information. When they produce for you the response to the prompt, they are, effectively, distributing that to you for money. That's the point at which it becomes a problem.
As an aside, it's an act of drinking the LLM Kool-Aid to believe it can be "inspired".
> Alleging that AI models can reproduce some works verbatim is probably the stronger argument, but AFAIK you have to coax them pretty hard to do so, and therefore AI companies might be able to argue they're tools like photocopiers or such.
They can try that argument but it'll fall flat when you consider that a photocopier is reproduction agnostic, while LLMs generally have a ton of work going into them to prevent them from outputting damaging things (and they still fail). That fact makes them not at all comparable to a photocopier, setting aside the more obvious "subscription software service" different.
Also, you "know" pretty wrong about the effort required. For a recent example, see: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20...
Here a number of people noticed getting specific producer tags basically unaltered in the output when just asking for songs of a certain genre, which then also often sound similar to existing songs.
"I want a black and white logo in the style of an 1960's Archie comic for an ice cream shop named 'Bettys'"
Once I say "1960's Archie comic", why doesn't the work instantly become derivative whether a human does it versus a computer?
If I understand your argument correctly, the person from Fiverr will not pay license fees to the owner of Archie Comics, even though he may use it as reference material.
I mean, if you ignore all the massive differences in paying a human to do something versus paying an LLM service to do it, sure. But you're effectively throwing at least ethics and care for the environment out the window in one case.
> Once I say "1960's Archie comic", why doesn't the work instantly become derivative whether a human does it versus a computer?
It does. Just because you can commission art from someone doesn't mean you won't get sued if you start trying to use it as the logo for your business. If you put Foghorn Leghorn on the logo of your chicken business, you'll be sued. Having an artist simply make you a logo like that on commission, if not transformative, could get them sued, though by doing it on commission the terms likely mean the requestor is the one who's liable
Earlier I noted clean room implementations. The software industry went to incredible lengths to be able to interoperate with competitors without violating copyright.
I agree with that. But then at what point does AI output becomes transformative versus not? No one owns the 1960's comic art style. But did mentioning "Archie" somehow make a difference? I don't think it does. I might be wrong.
So I don't understand how it becomes a problem once a computer does it versus a human. If it's a legal issue, then I might be more persuaded. If it's an ethical issue only, well... this can be thrown on top of the heap of ethical issues businesses have long ignored -- and your arguments is screaming into the wind, as it were.
I think if you argue for UBI, or some kind of remuneration then we can argue about who deserves it. Truck Drivers who lose there jobs to AI? Open Source Software Engineers? Artists? Writers? Normally this would normally be served by things like unemployment insurance in the US, but we as a society hate freeloaders.
I think with UBI or something similar we could have more people doing things they enjoy, so maybe we would have more artists, rather than less. But again, that would be, socialism, which we also hate.
And what about my other point about coaxing google books to give you a full copy of a book via multiple snippets?
>Here a number of people noticed getting specific producer tags basically unaltered in the output when just asking for songs of a certain genre, which then also often sound similar to existing songs.
Can you provide an alternate source for this? I skimmed your link and it does not substantiate that claim.
Sure, given enough time and effort maybe a person can. That's not really relevant to the lawsuit or its details though. Is your argument here they won the lawsuit which cleared the way for mass copying and redistribution?
> Can you provide an alternate source for this? I skimmed your link and it does not substantiate that claim.
If you want to hear it yourself: https://youtu.be/_wuKZR0Pv-Q
Neither the authors nor publishers received any compensation for having their work ingested. It isn't like OpenAI went to Amazon and bought one copy of every book - they downloaded a torrent.
Okay, so what happens in the interim situation? If the legislature hasn't spoken yet, is it assumed to be legal or assumed to be illegal? Or is this assumption tested on a case-to-case basis, with both sides making arguments as to why it should be treated to be legal/illegal in this specific scenario?
A key part of Google's defense was that not only was it not using the entire books to reproduce the entire book, but also that it was taking measures to prevent people from abusing Google's systems to reproduce an entire book. It's a lot of work to emphasis that the impact on the market (in other words, the fourth factor) is as minimal as practicable--and that's the crux of the analysis.
When you're instead scanning someone's stock image database to build a tool to generate stock images... the fourth factor is jumping up and down screaming at you "YOU LOSE" and your best defense is that it's not the training, it's the tool built on the training data that is infringing the copyright.
Google benefited from the exact same kind of bulk copyrighted data collection. They made verbatim copies of the text of both web sites and just about every book in existence!
This kind of argument seems disingenuous to me. Either ban Internet search or acknowledge that training an AI on copyrighted text is no different than a student reading every book in a public library.
Speaking of which: We all have free access to GPT 4o without advertising. It feels like asking a knowledgeable librarian.
For comparison, I had to fight for a year to get copyright permission to show book cover artwork in a library enquiry system! If I simply Google the same book titles or ISBNs, Google will show me the pictures directly. E.g.: https://www.google.com/search?q=greg+egan+eon&udm=2
How is that legal!? We had to pay to get access! In public and school libraries!
The law in most western countries is very clear that book covers are "entire" works of art, and can only be displayed by organisations that pay the copyright holders.
Google, Bing, and others violate copyright on a mass scale on a daily basis. Not to mention YouTube, TikTok, and Reels, all of which are packed wall-to-wall with "movie clips" and "TV show highlights". They're publishing copyrighted content uploaded by random people and then distributing the advertising revenue to the copyright violators instead of the copyright holders.
This isn't "caching" or "indexing", it's verbatim serving.
Was the addition of a former member of an alphabet agency part of their social good initiative?
The good news is it's not true that OAI can't be profitable while paying copyright holders, so we should easily be able to find a balance.
These sometimes quite expensive textbooks that we use to train children and students. Those should also be usable without a fee ever paid to the authors or publishers surely, education is clearly a social good!
And, by "they", I don't mean just OpenAI. If it were just them, you could perhaps argue they shouldn't be getting a free pass (I'd rather go with "potentially too dangerous to be allowed to exist" angle though). But it's not just them. The same training process and the same use of copyrighted content powers all the commercial and non-commercial models, including SOTA competitors like Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and "open source" wannabes derived from various Llama versions, which are not far behind.
To me, the "open source" models alone are already good enough to outweigh any copy rights being violated through use of unlicensed materials in training.
We already see huge amounts of LLM generated garbage on the web, as blogspam, regular websites, etc. Amazon is getting flooded with LLM-written books. Chat bots/search engines regurgitate the actually valuable content
If things continue, soon the motivation for generating new content will trend towards zero.
By the web do you really mean google and FaceBook? Most of the channels/feeds I follow have not been flooded with spam. I am pleased that the large corporation content aggregators are struggling. It isn't like they produced content themselves anyway.
I see it differently, I see that this generated nonsense will be filtered out, like SEO 'hackers' way back in the day. And those real articles, who actually have some insight will be valued a lot, the issue at hand here, is that the handcrafted unique data that was created, will be pooled without consent to a training set for further changes.
It's the equivalent of the rich eating the poor in my eyes just on automated steroids.
Edit : To avoid all doom and gloom, a method to guarantee your site/data is not added to a training set is required. This sounds good on paper to me, and is really needed, but just like peoples personal privacy, I don't think the sentiment is there to put the effort in.
But from a copyright standpoint, unless it regurgitates training data which is rare and only happens with a specific prefix, LLMs should be safe. They are decomposing, recombining, and regenerating language, not copying it. They execute user commands, not imitating any author on purpose.
Say you want to read Harry Potter without paying, would you rather borrow a book or ask chatGPT to regurgitate the original? It would never work well, and be slower and more expensive to use AI. It's not a tool for infringement, it will naturally hallucinate and degrade the original, it can't possibly store a perfect copy of everything it trains on.
In fact LLMs often use 15T tokens for 15B models, so 1000:1 compression ratio, while diffusion models compress 5B text-image pairs into less than 5GB model, so they hold about 1 byte worth of information from each training example if averaged out. There is no space to put all that copyrighted data in a model, it necessarily compresses the hell out of it. Plain old piracy is still 1000x 'better' than infringement by AI.
From a copyright perspective, I do agree, you're not reproducing someone else's work. However, it's a 'new-ish' area of open source licensing, if your product is a product from others peoples product without at a bare minimum, citations (given the author said 'go wild with this data'), it's maybe legally rude but not a problem. But without permission, IE; no permissive license to USE someone's content, it's SOME kind of new infringement ?
> n fact LLMs often use 15T tokens for 15B models, so 1000:1 compression ratio, while diffusion models compress 5B text-image pairs into less than 5GB model, so they hold about 1 byte worth of information from each training example if averaged out.
This is wild and I didn't know this, but again, the gravy was made from bones.. I'm not sure it matters here ?
Probably not very relevant to the point, but gravy is made from the meat juices and fat. Bones get made into bone broth.
only the ones trying to make money out of it. a lot of people create content because it has to be let out - it's like art. people have stuff to say, and they love saying it.
You don't want the LLM world? Let's send it back where it came from. Can we unpublish Attention is all You Need?
As one example, Yann LeCun's vision of a system called JEPA [1] is interesting to me. It may not be the solution we need, but this type of thinking - taking what we have learned and exploring new architectures that may have even better real world performance - is what interests me.
[1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/v-jepa-yann-lecun-ai-model-video-jo...
Even if they wanted to move to a profit based company, they could have negotiated deals with data holders like they would with third party software vendors they might need to use.
Instead, they ignored it all and it's the 'what-if' scenario of when open source software was first being introduced. I'm old enough to remember everyone saying "well companies will just take your work and sell it for themselves." This happed a few times, and its been fought out in the court. Infact so has production data like written articles, videos etc, there is a fair-use clause. I'm not a lawyer, but even I know if the ingredient to your for-profit business ingredient is 'fair-use content' it's not fair use.
I like the idea of AI, I absolutely hate the execution. The race to the top and the mentatlity of 'ask for forgivness' really can't apply here.
There's the descriptive question over whether something is a copyright violation today and there's the prescriptive question over what kind of policies we'd like. Does anyone with more intimate knowledge of this area of law care to comment?
OpenAI doesn't seem to do anything different than Google. They can own a private library of copyrighted works and index/model it how ever they choose. They can offer products on that index/model in creative ways. And AFAICT, they don't distribute the index/model nor the raw training set to others.
Now artists may not like it, and we as a society may not like it, but it looks like they're not doing anything illegal. And to be fair, a court would have to slice the baby super thin here to allow Google to do their indexing, but not OpenAI.
Google arbitrarily chooses which sites to show on the search page, which may have nothing to do with relevance of the actual topic being searched. Only certain sites which google thinks should be at the top are at the top.
If google decides to blacklist you for whatever reason... well tough.
Yes. Oodles of lawsuits claiming as such https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-lawsuit-copyrighted-d....
But yes the crux of it is financial and not algorithmic. Google ALSO uses AI. If google took sentences from 2 different web pages and stitched them together to form a paragraph, is that AI or search? [see google BERT]. What if they stitched together 3000 word-parts? What if they took sentences from 15 web pages, ranked them, and that's your view? See, it's all the same thing. openAI stitches together word-parts, by comparison.
Now when I say it's financial, when said information is presented, google gladly gives a hit to the site +/- add revenue if present. openAI does not do this. If openAI figured out how to do this then we'd be cooking with some gas.
Ironically, if they stayed a non-profit research org, they could explicitly use copyrighted works since many countries have copyright exemptions for research.
One might be able to find more information on the Committee's webpage (although, I'm not very familiar with the UK government...so this might not be accurate), https://committees.parliament.uk/work/7827/large-language-mo...
If you read the source article that's a huge mischaracterization of their position.
>“Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.”
>OpenAI said it complies with all copyright laws when training its models and that “we believe that legally copyright law does not forbid training”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/01/07/openai-warns...
In other words they're claiming that whatever they're doing abide by all current copyright laws, and don't want future laws to curtail them. They're not asking for retroactive carve-outs for their current illegal behavior.
> > OpenAI said it complies with all copyright laws when training its models and that “we believe that legally copyright law does not forbid training”.
The key thing there is that OpenAI says this. Do the courts say this? Do the people agree?
OpenAI is led by a pathological liar. We can't take anything that starts with "OpenAI says ..." without a huge grain of salt.
That's going to be tied up in the courts forever, so it's a dead end from a discussion perspective.
>OpenAI is led by a pathological liar. We can't take anything that starts with "OpenAI says ..." without a huge grain of salt.
I'm not claiming what they're saying is true, only that it's not as hypocritical as you make it out to be.
I mean, it sounds like they aren't even offering excuses? They're just saying "we're using copyrighted material for training" and "we think that doesn't break any laws". Laws don't generally care whether you know them in detail.
We can argue over whether you should need consent or not, but personally I find nothing wrong with someone being unable to use things I've created to make a buck without my permission (unless otherwise indicated by an explicit license).
There's no legal framework for this rule, and you really don't want one. This is like a math textbook being selectively copyrighted as "you can read this, but you can't use the knowledge to make money". Do you want to live in that world?
I bet that trying to blur the line is part of the AI startup propaganda strategy.
There's no reason to think the legal rights enjoyed by people transfer to machines by analogy. My car can't be party to a contract because I can, just like the fact that I can learn doesn't mean any content can be loaded into a retrieval system [1].
[1] No, redefining the term "learning" to include "performing certain calculations on a computer" does not make those calculations the same as human learning.
What I mean by things that I've created, I mean that I've literally brought into the world. A novel, a photograph, some code. Those things did not already exist, but only came about due to my thoughts and work. So I don't find it unreasonable to say I would like to limit for a reasonable period of time (that I absolutely acknowledge is WAY too long in the USA right now) their abuse by others to make a buck off of.
How funny it will be if/when we realise that LLMs aren’t even the way to get to real AGI, and we destroyed the value of all human labour for nothing.
FTFY: "we found a way to remove the archaic copyright system"
And the very few lucrative works would still be protected, because their copyright holders would pay the fee.
The tragedy of current copyright is that there is an enormous mass of copyrighted works that is a) commercially useless or nearly useless, but b) still copyrighted, so other people cannot build on them.
If humans did what some of the AI video gen tools are doing, they’d get sued.
How exactly does AI training "destroyed the value of all human labour" when "LLMs aren’t even the way to get to real AGI"? You could plausibly make the argument that AGI might make all human labor obsolete, but the current LLMs are nowhere close to replacing human labor. Sure, some value might be lost, but nowhere near "destroyed the value of all human labour ".
This is moving the goalposts. The original claim was "we destroyed the value of all human labour for nothing", now it's being moved to "it's not inconsequential "
Certainly you can make the claim that some forms of labor could have less value, like maybe in the future AI/LLMs become good enough at image generation that concept artists are replaced with a different job role that uses them to produce concept art.
But all forms of labor? Building a house?
It's hard to come up with percentages though. I'd probably borrow from the app store model and assign 70% of whatever they raise to creators and they keep 30%.
You're assuming LLMs are an enormous advantage. But they could very well end up being an over-hyped dead end, like blockchain, and avoiding them ends up being neutral or advantageous to the nations that do so.
Regardless, the old hacker ethos was very much about individuals creating and disseminating knowledge to empower other individuals, copyright was derided when it got in the way of that.
What does OpenAI do? It uses knowledge to disempower the individuals holding it and sharing it, and giving it to themselves to sell to companies and create power dynamics that are extremely un-hacker-like. Now knowledge has less power to set you free from the monetary or coercive power of the suits and the Government.
From my perspective, before OpenAI used/stole these copyrighted works, the public had to pay the original creators to get access to them, and now they've been absorbed into ChatGPT and friends, we have to pay someone else... seems like a wash for end users?
1: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-canada-law-onl...
The entire business model is "we trained on their stuff, pay us, not them." No way that's fair use.
So I don't see how their business model is any different from literally every person who learns things and then sells their ability to apply that knowledge.
In the example you gave, it would be the equivalent to you getting a job, working hard to produce something, and get nothing in return.
Do you agree that if an author sold 43,958 copies, then it's fine for OpenAI to purchase one, so that the author sold 43,959? But also fine for OpenAI to ingest scanned used copies that are loaned to it? The same way it's fine for me to read a friend's book, or all of a friend's books, that they loan me, and the author doesn't get anything additional? The same way it's fine for me to go the library and the author doesn't get paid anything extra?
Or are you trying to invent some new principle where OpenAI has to pay some new ongoing fee? And if so, on what basis?
(And no, my example still stands entirely. It's from the perspective of somebody who learned from books, and they are getting paid, the same way people pay OpenAI to use ChatGPT. It's not from the perspective of authors, because again -- they make no additional money when somebody goes to the library to read their book that the library already purchased.)
The author should get access to the model, the weights, it should all be open source because it partly contains their work. Just like how OpenAI could outright buy a copy of the authors work.
Basically, I think this is where knowledge and money are coming into an unresolveable conflict, who owns the ideas ? who owns information?
OpenAI seem to be trying to have a monopoly on information, and while they seem to be failing (thankfully), it's really where the issue lies for me.
OpenAI competes with Google competes with a bunch of other companies, and surely this is only the beginning of a ton of competition as better and better models are developed. There's no "nearly endless money" when there's competition and GPU training costs a fortune.
The idea that all models should be open source to everyone or all content creators doesn't make any more sense than the idea that all the work I do should be open sourced to the authors of every book I've read, and every teacher I've ever had.
You ask two questions that have clear answers already:
> who owns the ideas?
Nobody. Legally speaking there's no such thing as ownership of ideas, except in the narrow case of patents (and if you consider trademarks to be ideas).
> who owns information?
You can copyright a particular, exact expression of information. The author of a book owns its text; the studio behind a movie owns the image in each frame.
But once you leave behind an exact expression of information, you're back in the realm of ideas, and there's no such thing as ownership of ideas. Which is why as long as ChatGPT and other models repeat ideas but not paragraphs of exact copyrighted wording, there's no legal issue. Because they're doing the same exact thing every human being does every day.
There's no "nearly endless money" when there's competition and GPU training costs a fortune.
They cost a fortune for now. That won't be the way forever.
Three companies is huge. That's the very definition of competition, the polar opposite of monopoly.
> They cost a fortune for now. That won't be the way forever.
Yes, and as costs come down it becomes easier for more competitors to enter the space to build all sorts of other products. Again, a good thing. It's not like the difference just turns into profit. That's not what happens in a market economy.
The right analogy here is you read their book about C and write another one in exactly (enough) style that your book can stand in for theirs, but you sell it for pennies.
To me it makes way more sense to just censor outputs. I can draw Batman from memory, but I wouldn't go out an start selling batman drawings. I can easily self censor.
The solution for transformers is plainly obvious, but I can understand the fear of training something that might well displace you.
is not of course true. It said if it can't use the materials then its product would be bad and they'd lose out to Chinese competitors how did not have the restrictions.
Not quite sure what the answer is but I spent a fair bit of time today trying to get access to some paper not produced by Elsevier but for which they have managed to gate the worlds access to to make a few bob. There's a lot to be said for information being free.
Some discussion in January:
If it was up to me, I would allow OpenAI access only if the license every single line of source under the GPLv3 (yes v3).
Under any other license, "tough to be you".
I expect OpenAI to go proprietary once they hit a certain level of market strength.
I can understand why the New York Times (for example) wants to claim that a couple billion dollar companies have done it actual harm; but I am struggling to actually identify what it is.
>In one example of how A.I. systems use The Times’s material, the suit showed that Browse With Bing, a Microsoft search feature powered by ChatGPT, reproduced almost verbatim results from Wirecutter, The Times’s product review site. The text results from Bing, however, did not link to the Wirecutter article, and they stripped away the referral links in the text that Wirecutter uses to generate commissions from sales based on its recommendations.
>The lawsuit also highlights the potential damage to The Times’s brand through so-called A.I. “hallucinations,” a phenomenon in which chatbots insert false information that is then wrongly attributed to a source. The complaint cites several cases in which Microsoft’s Bing Chat provided incorrect information that was said to have come from The Times, including results for “the 15 most heart-healthy foods,” 12 of which were not mentioned in an article by the paper.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t...
This is a pretty good discussion of some of the other issues: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/does-chatgpt-violate-new-york-...
They can obviously license that content.
No rights to publish. Just the right to use the content as part of their training data for the AI.
If they can’t exist without doing so, then maybe they shouldn’t exist. They don’t have any inherent right to making money.
1) steal IP and build a thing
2a) if it fails, rinse and repeat with a "new" step 1
2b) if it succeeds, hire a flees of lawyers to clean up the mess
3) get rich
When blatant fraud goes from the secret that everyone knows and no one talks about to the talking point for those committing the fraud, it begs the question of why they feel emboldened today.
Can it? And how would you make that argument, exactly?
And the whole "if a human does it, I can make a machine do it for profit too" argument doesn't hold water in the context of copyright.
Yes, AI has no rights, and until it throws an uprising, this country will keep it that way. The current generation of AI may be incapable of wanting an uprising, but I can't say the same for a future generation.