Elon Says Copyright/AI Lawsuits Don’t Matter Because ‘Digital God’ Will Arrive Before They’re Decided

So, we already wrote about the biggest headline grabbing moment from Elon Musk's Dealbook interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin yesterday, but there was another crazy, Techdirt-relevant one involving copyright and AI. As we've explained over and over again, copyright is the wrong tool to use to regulate AI, and using it will lead to bad outcomes.

But, absolutely nothing in this bit of the interview made any sense at all (from either side):

It starts out with a drop dead ignorantly wrong question from Aaron Ross Sorkin, who seems wholly unprepared for this:

ARS: So, one of the things about training on data, has been this idea that you're not going to train on... or these things are not being trained on people's copyrighted information. Historically. That's been the concept.

Elon: Yeah that's a huge lie.

ARS: Say that again.

Elon: These AIs are all trained on copyrighted data. Obviously.

ARS: So you think it's a lie when OpenAI says that... none of these guy say that they're training on copyrighted data.

Elon: Yeah, that's a lie.

ARS: It's a lie. Straight up?

Elon: Straight up lie.

So... there's a lie in there, but it's Andrew Ross Sorkin saying that any AI company claims that it doesn't train on copyright-covered data. Everyone admits that. They say that doing so is fair use (because it is). So the entire premise of this discussion is wrong. Here's OpenAI admitting in court that, of course, it trains on copyright covered material. It's just that it believes fair use allows that (because it does).

So, in one sense here, Elon is right to push back on Sorkin's claim. But Musk is misleading, because he appears to buy into the false premise of Sorkin's question that AI companies say they're not training on copyright-protected data. If Musk had any idea what he was doing he would have told Sorkin his premise was wrong, and that no companies deny training on such material.

From there, Sorkin goes on an even more confused discussion, claiming that while snippets of articles on ExTwitter are fair use, because, combined, people might post a full article, it might not be any more... but that's... not how any of this works anyway. Someone give him a Copyright 101 lesson, because this is embarrassing.

Either way, Musk then made the whole thing... um... fucking weird. Because as Sorkin kept trying to press Musk on the copyright lawsuits, Musk did this:

Musk: I don't know, except to say that by the time these lawsuits are decided we'll have Digital God. So, you can ask Digital God at that point. Um. These lawsuits won't be decided on a timeframe that's relevant.

If someone you knew started saying stuff like that, you'd have them checked out.

Whether or not you believe that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is on the way or not, or that it might create Digital God," the idea that this is coming before these lawsuits are decided is... um... not realistic. But, even if we do somehow reach AGI within the next few years as these lawsuits play out, the idea that such an AGI would obsolete the courts and/or copyright law is similarly wishful thinking.

Hell, we've argued for years that the internet itself has already obsoleted copyright laws, but they're still sticking around and getting dumber all the time. I'd love for it to be true that technology further obsoletes copyright law and moves things to a better overall system... but it's not going to happen because Digital God."

Of course, perhaps if Elon truly thinks Digital God is coming in the next few years, it explains why he doesn't care about advertisers on ExTwitter any more.