OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work

Plus in this case I don't even think it a copyright violation to analyze protected works. And even creating derivates of some form isn't, since that is the way any form of art works in the first place.

Sure, perhaps they would need a license to get the material, but I don't see how broken copyright laws will be of any help here.

The US has found ways to get China to adhere to IP laws, but they're never going to agree to restrictions the US doesn't impose on itself. Presuming that there is no way China will respect IP laws is BS.

Nature is a complex system. Many are in competition, it's not just humans. Most of these systems form a balance (see biodiversity). Due to resource scarcity, power tends to form which gives these power structures and advantage. Humans form these power structures arounds groups. This has been happening for as long as humans tribalised. Right now, humans can form these groups at nation-state level complexity and to some extent more global. This is humans current best effort. If you can do better, please do.

The "race" analogy is entirely driven by venture capital framing: they are interested in controlling the market usually done by getting to a certain dominant position within the overall space thereby crowding out new entrants and being able to direct where the market goes.

China's lead efforts on the other hand look to the long view - by releasing their products as open-source they can improve on each other's work. No one controls the market but there is constant competition and innovation.

All this is besides the point, however, for this article claims that OpenAI is using China as an excuse to have unfettered access to all copyrighted works through the fair use loophole.

So the crux is whether we believe in "innovation uber alles" or intellectual property rights.

I mean, I do think we should want to win the race, the point is they want to keep all the money. You can literally just offer equity as compensation to "content providers" and we won't have any problems with liquidity issues on the development side, and people can still be compensated or opt out.

OpenAI doesn't want to do that.

It seems like the term "race" comes from "arms race".

Perhaps the future of Silicon Valley is to be the home of defense contractors.

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/SiliconValle...

Why? Why do we have to? Why do companies get to take the creative output of humanity for free to make a profit?

Why is it a national security issue? Because people who could make billions of dollars say so?

You're assuming this leads...somewhere. Currently, AI is not all that useful. And progress seems to be slowing, not accelerating.

It's not that hard. So if you want to ask questions or work with a Stephen King book, you have to rent it during your LLM session. OpenAi would make a small fee, the author would get the majority, and the user gets value. You don't have to be a billion-dollar company to set up a monetization structure like that. Startups could do this if they negotiate with authors.

For general questions, you can use the free wiki that's ingested into the LLM or pay a fee for general content like current events.

You keep the LLM free in the third-world out of necessity. OpenAI, in the first world, cannot ask to be treated as if it were a third-world company because we are too rich to be that ridiculous.

I call XY on this. The problem is inherit in LLMs and the solution is something else altogether, not just allowing companies to ignore the law and lobby for changing said law after the fact.

By this logic Google Search couldn't exist. Except that Google won those cases.

You know, there's a creative third way which the US could approach if it had the cajones.

Allow OpenAI and other AI companies to use all data for training, but require that they pay it forward by charging royalties on profits beyond X amount of profit, where X is a number high enough to imply true AGI was reached.

The royalties could go into a fund that would be paid out like social security payments for every American starting when they were 18 years old. Companies could likewise request a one time deferred payment or something like that.

It's having your cake and eating it. Also helping ease some tensions around job loss.

Sadly, what we'll likely get is a bunch of tech leaders stumbling into wild riches, hoarding it, and then having it taken from them by force after they become complacent and drunk on power without the necessary understanding of human nature or history to see why they've brought it on themselves.

> So basically, we know China is never going to pay the publishers/content creators (never)

Who is we? How do you know? Never is a strong word.

> If we hold our principles to OpenAI (pay who you took from), they will go bankrupt.

i.e. their business wasn't feasible to begin with? Sounds fine? What's wrong with them being bankrupt (if needed).

I'm not OK with that, though... and here we have the nut of the problem. There is no agreement as to what's acceptable and what's not.

I personally think that the odds of me me being able to both publicly publish my words and code and be able to keep them out of training data is pretty close to zero. Since that's unacceptable to me, my only option is not to publish that stuff at all.

“Haters” is nothing more than a thought-terminating cliche.

Either that, or copyright law is bad in its current form and LLM’s are yet an example of what exposes that.

Even if copyright owners can’t point to how much damage, if any, they suffer from AI, it’s seen as wrong and bad. I think it’s getting boring to hear that story about copyright repeat itself. In most crimes, you need to be able point to a damage that was done to you.

Also, while there are edge cases in some LLM’s where you can make them spew some verbatim training material, often through jailbreaks or whatnot, an LLM is a destructive process involving ”fuzzy logic” where the content is generally not perfectly memorized, and seems no more of a threat to copyright than recording broadcasts onto cassette tapes or VHS were back in the day. You’d be insane to use that stuff as a source of truth on par with the original article etc.

The product doesn't require crime, but the massive profitability of their business model requires it.

And the red herring that "China will steal it if we don't do it first".

Yeah, we have a wrong conception. It's fine, society often has wrong conceptions. We are just dead wrong about ruthless capitalism. A company is a custodian of a good society, it has responsibilities that far exceed profit.

>> Its obligation is to its owners and not to society.

This isn't true at all. It has an obligation to follow the law of the society it operates in, even if that results in lower profits.

> against progress of advancements for arts and sciences.

No it’s always against commercialization. That’s why we have exceptions like political commentary, satire and in particular arts and sciences. The issue is about making money from someone else’s work.

You can still disagree with it of course, but let’s have an honest discussion.