alt Hacker NewsUS gov sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material
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I won't be the first on HN to mention how having a niche tech blog is becoming unmaintainable, and this reads like a greenlight to scrape away. The Creepy Crawlies post[1] from a few days back was basically a checklist of nonsense I have to deal with, albeit on a smaller scale. Even so, it's getting outside my budget.
I'd much prefer a world where everything is not locked behind a login with bonus 2FA, but that sure seems like where we're headed.
I think it makes sense to say training on material you legally acquired is fair use. Copyright, quite famously, doesn't protect ideas. Nobody really needs or wants AI models to reproduce verbatim copies of books or images or whatever, and they try not to do this anyway, and just because you could maybe make an image or whatever with a copyrighted character design or something, normal intellectual property law already restricts you from selling it etc. Seems fine.
The New York Times prides itself as staying relevant with digital content. Forced trends like Wordle are still staples in their marketing. It's ironic that they continue a smear campaign against artificial intelligence which includes suing AI companies for training on their digital content.
I would like clarity on copyright rules and regulations but it's hard to sympathize with NYT when they have been so aggressive with their AI fear-mongering. The authors and artists must be the centerpiece instead of giant corporations. I doubt they will use any leverage to actually improve ethical usage of copyright with AI, and they only want to protect shareholder profits.
https://aiinstitute.hbs.edu/platform-rctom/submission/the-ne...
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If they're going to treat copyright works like a public good, then the product they produce should also be a public good to prevent the "free-rider" problem.
--- The free rider problem is also a form of market failure... The production of public goods results in positive externalities which are not remunerated. If private organizations do not reap all the benefits of a public good which they have produced, their incentives to produce it voluntarily might be insufficient. ---
The US government has just made the NY Times content a public good, and in doing so, allowed openai to create a private good, for which they will be remunerated instead.
It could be argued that this means the US government has effectively taken profit from one company to fund another, under the guise of helping global competitiveness, and whilst this may be the current M.O. of the Trump administration it means predominantly domestic companies are effectively forced into providing export subsidies for the new industry, and monopolising (or oligopolising?) an incumbent.
I wonder if on this basis Seedance could also be equally legally be allowed to use copyrighted media for its video AI, so effectively they're also pulling the legs out from under the film industry too.