AIVsCopyright

The NewYorkTimes has sued OpenAI and MicroSoft

My comment :

I think there are real issues with the verbatim replication of text. And the fake NYT articles. It's a fair cop to consider the first as a copyright violation. And in an age of fakes and disinformation, we need stronger laws to stop people falsely attributing ideas or expression to anyone else. We shouldn't be allowed to publicly lie and claim a person said or did something they didn't. Or that the NYT published an article they didn't.

OpenAI and Microsoft should be held accountable and fined for each violation of these that they allow to slip through their quality control.

OTOH we absolutely DON'T WANT and shouldn't have, any blanket laws preventing anyone, whether machine or human, "learning from", the data or works of another. Or the idea of "copyright" datasets that a machine can't look at without payment.

Copyright is already waaaay too draconian and restrictive. The last thing we need is Disney being able to prevent anyone seeing and learning how to paint in the style of Disney animation. Or the NYT preventing people paraphrasing or summarizing their articles. Or any private company being able to use the law to prevent rivals accessing and working with same raw ideas and facts that they were working with.

There would be no freedom of information or informed citizenship if we allow panic over AI to make laws that allow corporations to bottle up ideas as exclusive property.

Copyright should ALWAYS be limited to mere specific concrete expressions of ideas. Not "higher order" or more abstract representations of the same ideas (such as parameters in an LLM). And it is no more "copying" to train weights based on a Disney image or a NYT text than it is copying for a human to read an article and learn (by rewiring the neurons in their brain) to write about the same topic in a similar way. If there are to be constraints enforced, it should be downstream, on the output of generative AI, not the input to it.

We must protect the freedom to learn and share information and to spread and reuse and develop on ideas. We can't stop AI learning and sharing information. Both because that's how we're going to get AIs that create massive value for us. But also because the alternative is to clamp down even more on freedom to access and use ideas, creating new categories of oppressive restrictions.

Finally as a practical thought. The internet which should have been a tool for sharing ideas and helping the best knowledge spread, has already become a conduit for junk science and disinformation. Good academic research is already behind absurdly expensive paywalls and obscure UX, while cranks liberally spray over YouTube and social media. If quality newspapers (and other sources) demand to be removed from the biggest, most publicly used training sets, then AIs are just going to get worse. Because the cranks be happy to fill the vacuum with their nonsense. And we'll have more powerful and convenient AIs spewing fake ideas and propaganda.

It's a terrible precedent for the NYT to set, that the paper "of record" will be lest well represented in the knowledge base of the most widely accessed educators on the planet.