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Comment by foxglacier | Hacker News Reader

Companies that didn't give away all their content for free to anyone have actually denied AI companies from training on all their data without paying a fee. Reddit, Associated Press, etc.

For those who chose to give it all away, the ship has sailed, but they did choose to give it away for free to anyone so they can't complain that they succeeded.

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How exactly other websites “gave it all away”? Also examples you list are websites putting some explicit rule eg in their robots.txt or filtering web crawlers. This is all a reaction to existing situation, so Reddit for sure has been scrapped before Reddit realised what was happening.

At what point did the authors whose books showed up in the ai companies training data sets “give it all away” as you claim?

If the AI company bought their book, then they didn't give it all away. If the AI company obtained it indirectly like a library or 2nd hand, then the author has already been paid when he first sold it. In either case, he could have refused to be so liberal in sharing it if he didn't want it to be used like that, but he preferred to make some money instead.

Does a torrent count?

If buying one copy of a book entitles the ai company to train on that data and redistribute information derived from it in perpetuity, then why shouldn’t a rival ai company be allowed to train on tokens from say OpenAI and redistribute information derived from the OpenAI model also in perpetuity? The rival ai company paid for the tokens, after all.

Yes, information is not copyright protected. It's mostly free. The rival company isn't allowed to train on AI output because it didn't buy the AI output, it agreed to a contract where it said "I won't do that".

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