It's the New York Times and various journalist and writers' unions that are leading the charge against American AI.
American journalists and opinion piece writers want to kill American AI and let China and Russia have the global lead. Why? Have they taught about the long consequences of what they are doing?
I think you're framing it in a way that makes it seem like they don't want to be compensated for working, they just want to stop other people from starting a new industry, which doesn't seem like a good faith understanding of the situation.
Everytime an answer is drawn from "certain learned weights," make it so that the source of that knowledge is paid cents per volume.
Then if we get past that, my suspicion is that you could game the training. Like have as much of the process happen via public domain sources or pay-once licenses. That would cover a lot of the fundamental knowledge and processes. Then you could fine-tune on copyrighted data. That might actually make it easier to see how much influence on the final weights that content has, but is also would probably be a lot less influence. There's a big difference between a painting of an apple being the main contribution to the concept of "apple" in an image model, vs mention of that painting corresponding to a few weights that just reference a bunch of other concepts that were learned via open data.
Well, Bing AI already knows where it drew the information from and cites sources; so it would be a matter of making the deal.
How to enforce it? that's the main question I reckon.
> Then if we get past that, my suspicion is that you could game the training. Like have as much of the process happen via public domain sources or pay-once licenses.
I agree.
It would be easier to negotiate a fixed cost on using a particular datum per training of a model.
The first arrangement is very clearly a labor arrangement; but the second one is a deliberate attempt to force artists to act like capitalists. More importantly, because art is now acting like capital, it provides an obvious economic instinct to centralize[0]. So you get industrialized artistic production under the banner of publishing companies, whose business model is to buy out the copyright to new creative works and then exploit them.
What AI art does is transfer money from the labor side of art to the capital side of art. The MAFIAA[1] wants AI art to exist because it means they can stop paying artists but still make royalties off selling licenses to the AI companies. This increases their profit margins. Meanwhile, the journalists can't sell you old news; they need to spend lots of time and money gathering it every day. That business model only works in a world where writers are scarce, not just the writing itself being artificially scarce.
[0] We can see this with cryptocurrency, which is laughably centralized despite being a deliberate attempt to decentralize money.
[1] Music and Film Industry Association of America, a hypothetical merger of the RIAA and MPAA from a satirical news article
Is it interesting? They hate the people who produce their product and are desperate to replace them with machines. Note that their unions also hate AI, and it was a central reason for for the Writer's Guild SAG-AFTRA strike, since you're bringing up the NYT unions.
The NYT also stands to benefit not an iota from AI. It probably causes a burden because they have to make sure that their awful long-in-the-tooth editorial columnists aren't turning in LLM slop. It is entirely a negative for people who generate high quality content the hard way.