Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
Nah. Copyright is broken, but it’s broken because it lasts too long, and it can be held by constructs. People should still reserve the right to not have the things they’ve made incorporated into projects or products they don’t want to be associated with.
The right to refusal is important. Consent is important. The default permission should not be shifted to “yes” in anybody’s mind.
The fact that a not insignificant number of people seem to think the only issue here is money points to some pretty fucking entitled views among the would-be-billionaires.