Can The AI Industry Continue To Avoid Paying for the Content They're Using?

Last year Marc Andreessen's firm "argued that AI companies would go broke if they had to pay copyright royalties or licensing fees," notes a Los Angeles Times technology columnist. But are these powerful companies doing even more to ensure they're not billed for their training data?Just this week, British media outlets reported that OpenAI has made the same case, seeking an exemption from copyright rules in England, claiming that the company simply couldn't operate without ingesting copyrighted materials.... The AI companies also argue what they're doing falls under the legal doctrine of fair use - probably the strongest argument they've got - because it's transformative. This argument helped Google win in court against the big book publishers when it was copying books into its massive Google Books database, and defeat claims that YouTube was profiting by allowing users to host and promulgate unlicensed material. Next, the AI companies argue that copyright-violating outputs like those uncovered by AI expert Gary Marcus, film industry veteran Reid Southern and the New York Times are rare or are bugs that are going to be patched. But finally, William Fitzgerald, a partner at the Worker Agency and former member of the public policy team at Google, predicts Google will try to line up supportive groups to tell lawmakers artists support AI:Fitzgerald also sees Google's fingerprints on Creative Commons' embrace of the argument that AI art is fair use, as Google is a major funder of the organization. "It's worrisome to see Google deploy the same lobbying tactics they've developed over the years to ensure workers don't get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald said. And OpenAI is close behind. It is not only taking a similar approach to heading off copyright complaints as Google, but it's also hiring the same people: It hired Fred Von Lohmann, Google's former director of copyright policy, as its top copyright lawyer.... [Marcus says] "There's an obvious alternative here - OpenAI's saying that we need all this or we can't build AI - but they could pay for it!" We want a world with artists and with writers, after all, he adds, one that rewards artistic work - not one where all the money goes to the top because a handful of tech companies won a digital land grab. "It's up to workers everywhere to see this for what it is, get organized, educate lawmakers and fight to get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald says. "Because if they don't, Google and OpenAI will continue to profit from other people's labor and content for a long time to come."

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