I wonder who will come out on top, and whether there will be any incidental improvements for consumers, but unfortunately I can imagine an "AI training exemption" all too well.
[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happen...
Indeed. But when do those intersect or diverge?
I don't blame him. What would you do? If I had a near perfect data training set of all the most useful books and a hungry AI to train, it would be the logical step.
The reason this is news is because of the stinking hypocrisy of it all. It's really the same topic as the Swartz-Altman discussion here [0], in that these giant companies want to have it both ways.
Where is Zuckerberg's shout-out for Alexandra Elbakyan? [1] Or for Brewster Kahle? Or any of the wast army of people who preserve and curate the vital culture of humanity by protecting it from intellectual property dungeons?
The colossal hypocrisy is that a company like Meta wishes to live under the protective umbrella of "Intellectual Property". It wants to stop me just stealing it's stuff and setting up a better Facebook
Were it exposed to the same rules it wishes to live by, it would be torn apart by vibrant and deserving competition within days.
All the Zuckerberg, Meta or OpenAI are doing is setting the ground for the abolition of intellectual property. They are literally the proverbial people who will buy the rope with which to hang themselves.
(Edit. that doesn't make sense insert <proverb about buying ropes that actually makes sense>)
In fact, I'd argue that Big Tech is pro copyright, because once they force the copyright holder to negotiate, the cost is irrelevant to them and they build a moat around that access.
For example, Google stole Reddit content for Gemini until Reddit was forced to the table, and now Google has a seemingly exclusive agreement around Reddit data for AI purposes.
Yep, the contradiction between them feeling entitled to use anything they want for training, while simultaneously having license terms which forbid using the output of their models to train other models is pretty glaring. Information wants to flow freely but only in one direction apparently.
I haven't been following it closely, but aren't there already court rulings saying that generative AI output by itself is not copyrightable?
I agree but for a different reason -- cost is actually relevant, in the sense that only the biggest player can afford to pay for the copyrights. If you are a small player, however your tech stack is or how good your model is, if you can't afford it, you can't compete with Google.
Now I guess it’s defended as good business and good science by so many flunkies.
Knifes edge stuff. Tech people should all be reading the books, not Mark’s steamroller.
There goes the gravy train
Their ideal outcome is that there's some narrow carveout that gives them permission to ignore copyright where they want to, while extending similar permission to as few/irrelevant others as possible.
The whole conflict boils down to one party having piles of money and another party having something they want. That's not an intractable problem.
If you train a model 20B parameters on 20T tokens, even with 1000 tokens per example, the model extracts about 1 byte of information per example. What is the value of 1 byte of copyright infringement?