It’s becoming increasingly apparent that one of the reasons why tech companies are so enthusiastic about shoving AI into every product and service is that they fundamentally do not understand…
Unfortunately there is a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation here. Put overly simply: If we start enforcing copyright in training AI models now, do you really believe that any companies who have already trained their models are really going to just toss them? I’m afraid that it’s going to just be regulatory capture where the existing big names just pull the ladder up behind them while still making money off of their stolen content fueled plagiarism machines.
We’ll ignore that OpenAI isn’t actually profitable for the sake of the argument.
That said, abolishing copyright is quite possibly the stupidest solution I’ve ever heard for this issue.
No, I don’t think they would. But I also do think that copyright has been bastardized from its original intent (mostly by Disney). Abolishing it entirely while not moving away from capitalism would be bad. Going back to it only lasting for the lifetime of the creator, and not being able to pass it down would be better.
Id argue that to some extent, its foundational to capitalism, such that any effort to actually abolish it would almost necessarily require destroying or significantly curtailing capitalism to succeed anyway. Virtually every company based on selling information, such as software and media companies that are some of the biggest on the planet right now, would find such an effort an existential threat, and even companies not based on such things may have patents or designs that give them an edge and that they would expend a lot on avoiding giving competition free range to copy. If you’re able to overpower them on something so important to them, in so consequential a fashion, then their grip on economic and political power would have to already have been greatly reduced, and some other basis of such power to draw on for support would have to exist.
Unfortunately there is a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation here. Put overly simply: If we start enforcing copyright in training AI models now, do you really believe that any companies who have already trained their models are really going to just toss them? I’m afraid that it’s going to just be regulatory capture where the existing big names just pull the ladder up behind them while still making money off of their stolen content fueled plagiarism machines.
We’ll ignore that OpenAI isn’t actually profitable for the sake of the argument.
That said, abolishing copyright is quite possibly the stupidest solution I’ve ever heard for this issue.
No, I don’t think they would. But I also do think that copyright has been bastardized from its original intent (mostly by Disney). Abolishing it entirely while not moving away from capitalism would be bad. Going back to it only lasting for the lifetime of the creator, and not being able to pass it down would be better.
Id argue that to some extent, its foundational to capitalism, such that any effort to actually abolish it would almost necessarily require destroying or significantly curtailing capitalism to succeed anyway. Virtually every company based on selling information, such as software and media companies that are some of the biggest on the planet right now, would find such an effort an existential threat, and even companies not based on such things may have patents or designs that give them an edge and that they would expend a lot on avoiding giving competition free range to copy. If you’re able to overpower them on something so important to them, in so consequential a fashion, then their grip on economic and political power would have to already have been greatly reduced, and some other basis of such power to draw on for support would have to exist.