But if it's not fair use, they'd need to negotiate a custom license on top of that, for every single thing they use.
If it's fair use for OpenAI to steal content wholesale without fair compensation (as decided by the creator, unless they have granted the management of that license to a third-party) just to train AI models, then that opens a Pandora's Box where anyone can steal content to train their own models, creating an environment where copyright is basically meaningless. On the other hand, making it not fair use opens a different Pandora's Box, where these models have to be trained in fundamentally different ways to create the same outcome - and where countries like China, who notoriously ignore copyright laws, can leap ahead of the industry.
Almost like the problem is less AI, and more overly broad copyright laws. Maybe the compromise is slashing that window back down to something reasonable, like twenty to fifty years or so, like how we deal with patents.
Can you tell me the specific number of dollars that would be?
I interpreted "pay the price of each copyrighted work" as the sale price, a criticism of things like meta's piracy.
If there was a mandatory licensing regime that AI could use, and there was an exact answer for what the payment would be, I think it might make sense to use "the price" to talk about that license. But right now in today's world it's very confusing to use "the price" to talk about a hypothetical negotiation that has not happened yet, where many many works would never have a number available.
Where have they paid for each artwork from DeviantArt, paheal, etc that they trained Stable Diffusion on?
Where have they paid for each independent blog post that they trained ChatGPT on?
Yes, they've made a few deals with specific companies that host a large amount of content. That's a far cry from paying a fair price for each copyrighted work they ingest. Nearly everything on the Internet is copyrighted, because of the way modern copyright works, and they have paid for nearly none of it.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/14/nx-s1-5258952/new-york-times-...
They didn't even consider doing this before. They still, as far as I know, haven't paid a dime for any book, or art beyond stock photography.
Lawsuit is still ongoing, if openai loses it might spell doom for legal production and usage of LLMs as a whole. There isn't enough open, free data out there to make state of the art AI.
But there are models trained on legal content (like Wikipedia or StackOverflow). Also, no human needs to read millions of pirated books to become intelligent.
Literally all of them are trained on wikipedia and SO. But /none/ of them are /only/ trained on wikipedia and SO. They need much more than that.
> Also, no human needs to read millions of pirated books to become intelligent.
Obviously, LLM architectures that were inspired by GPT 2/3 are not learning like humans.
There has never been anything remotely good in the world of LLM that could have been said to have been trained on a moderate, more human scoped amount of data. They're all trained on trillions of tokens.
Models trained on less than 1T are experimental jokes that have no real use to provide.
You'll notice even so called "open data" LLMs like Olmo are, in fact, also trained on copyrighted data, datasets like Common Crawl claim fair use over anything that can be accessed from a web browser.
And then there's the whole notion of laundered data by training on synthetic data generated by another LLM. All the so-called "open" LLMs include a very significant amount of LLM-generated data. If you agree to the notion that LLMs trained on copyrighted work are a form of IP infringement and not fair use, then training on their output is just data laundering and doesn't fix the issue.
It's fuzzy. I could imagine a situation where a primary LLM trained on copyrighted material is a big hazard and can't be released, but carefully monitored and filtered output could be declared copyright-safe, and then used to make a copyright-safe secondary LLM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshot_AI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baichuan
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-intellectual-pro...
So I'm not sure that it would really change the status quo for a different group of already rich people to profit off of art created largely by the working poor and owned largely by another group of already rich people.
I guess if you think the government can accomplish what you propose, sure. But seems like that's not going to happen. Except maybe in China, and it sounds like that might be even worse for everyone.
Thus, it really seems like there's a solid point here that abandoning copyright to allow private investors to get rich stealing art from other rich people who really just stole it from poor people anyways is better than not doing that.
I did not propose that any rich people profit off of it. It should be a public good.
> I guess if you think the government can accomplish what you propose, sure. But seems like that's not going to happen. Except maybe in China, and it sounds like that might be even worse for everyone.
Throw it at universities, fund it and organize it well. They can take it from where we are right now.
They're mostly the entities that can afford to enforce their copyrights. Copyright is for the wealthy, unfortunately.
It was Tipper Gore that thought the world would come to an end because of rap music.
Let’s just not give the government any more power in our lives than necessary.
> Let’s just not give the government any more power in our lives than necessary.
Let's stop giving corporations all of the power and get a government that actually works for us.
Because eventually, the other side will do something you don’t like.
This is the government people voted for.
The government has a “monopoly on violence”. No corporation can force you to do anything, take away your freedom (the US has the highest incarceration rate of any democracy) or your property (see civil forfeiture). I can much more easily avoid a corporation than the government.
Avoid Tesla, and give me the steps you follow.
> Because eventually, the other side will do something you don’t like.
Yeah they might do equally egregious things like:
1) staging a fascist takeover of the government
2) a powerless idiot's idiot wife might dislike a music genre 30 years ago
The problem isn't government, it's a populace that is alergic to useful government.
Tell me one corporation that you can’t get away from? Now tell me how you avoid an over powerful government?
Why would you want to give a government with the history of the US more power?
Trump was elected fair and square. If you want to blame anyone - blame Americans. Despite the bullshit that the Democrats spout about “this isn’t who we are”. This is exactly who we are. Why would I want to give the government more control? Do you think the Democrats would be any more hands off when it comes to content?
I blame, primarily, the corporate takeover of government, punctuated by Citizen's United and everything that came after, and a couple of generations of a Republican party who have no goal other than setting out to prove that government is the enemy to take the heat off of their corporate masters.
> Tell me one corporation that you can’t get away from? Now tell me how you avoid an over powerful government?
I already did: avoid Tesla, show me how it's done. You can't, because the asshole in charge bought enough of the government to be in control. That's what happens when you have corporations with unchecked power, which is the inevitible conclusion of a powerless government.
You think you give the corporations all of the money and they're going to be bound by some tiny neutered government? No, they'll just buy it and then do what they want.
Try again, Trump famously didn’t have much corporate backing in 2016. Corporations wanted a standard Republican. He didn’t have any more money than the DNC. He is what the majority of the American people wanted.
> You think you give the corporations all of the money and they're going to be bound by some tiny neutered government?
Again, tell me how a corporation can shoot me with impunity, take my property without due process, literally take away my freedom or stop me because I “fit the description” or look like I don’t belong in a neghborhood where I know I my income was twice the median income in the county?
You worry about some theoretical abstract corporate power, I worry about jack booted thugs with the full force of the government behind them
I thought you said it didn't start with Trump?
And your premise is wrong anyway, Trump had plenty of corporate support in 2016 and more in 2024, he just had some token resistance from big corps relative to others, they got over it quickly and it was never more than just for show.
> Again, tell me how a corporation can shoot me with impunity, take my property without due process, literally take away my freedom or stop me because I “fit the description” or look like I don’t belong in a neghborhood where I know I my income was twice the median income in the county?
By just doing it, what you think they can't find guns and assholes who need money or are evil? You think they can't find ways to cheat you out of your property or life? Who's going to stop them?
You tear down the government, the corporations will make their own in their own image. The government is _supposed_ to be there, it's the people coming together to do the shared work of society for the common good.
It just has to be a good government, the people have to fight for that. Half of our people fight to tear it down instead and the other half barely know what the hell they want.
> You worry about some theoretical abstract corporate power, I worry about jack booted thugs with the full force of the government behind them
They're the same people. Look at our government. Theoretical abstract, what are you talking about, it's the literal nazi shithead in the whitehouse and all the rest of his enablers.