OpenAI Says It’s "Over" If It Can’t Steal All Your Copyrighted Work
OpenAI is raising the specter of China and predicting the US will lose the AI race if it's unable to scrape copyrighted materials.
Oh no not the plagiarism machine however would we recover???
Please fail and die openai thx
Also copyright is bullshit and IP shouldn’t exist especially for corporate entities. Free sharing of human knowledge and creativity should be a right. Machine plagiarism to create uninspired mimicries isn’t a necessary part of that process and should be regulated heavily
Getting really tired of these fucking CEOs calling their failing businesses "threats to national security" so big daddy government will come and float them again. Doubly ironic its coming from a company whos actually destroying the fucking planet while it achieves fuck-all.
If this passes, piracy websites can rebrand as AI training material websites and we can all run a crappy model locally to train on pirated material.
That would work if you were rich and friends with government officials. I don’t like your chances otherwise.
Another win for piracy community
You are a glass half full sort of person!
Fuck it. I'm training my home AI will the world's TV, Movies and Books.
Good, go away.
Okay, I can work with this. Hey Altman you can train on anything that's public domain, now go take those fuck ton of billions and fight the copyright laws to make public domain make sense again.
counterpoint: what if we just make an exception for tech companies and double fuck consumers?
Counter counterpoint: I don't know, I think making an exception for tech companies probably gives a minor advantage to consumers at least.
You can still go to copilot and ask it for some pretty fucking off the wall python and bash, it'll save you a good 20 minutes of writing something and it'll already be documented and generally best practice.
Sure the tech companies are the one walking away with billions of dollars and it presumably hurts the content creators and copyright holders.
The problem is, feeding AI is not significantly different than feeding Google back in the day. You remember back when you could see cached versions of web pages. And hell their book scanning initiative to this day is super fucking useful.
If you look at how we teach and train artists. And then how those artists do their work. All digital art and most painting these days has reference art all over the place. AI is taking random noise and slowly making things look more like the reference art that's not wholly different than what people are doing.
We're training AI on every book that people can get their hands on, But that's how we train people too.
I say that training an AI is not that different than training people, and the entire content of all the copyright they look at in their lives doesn't get a chunk of the money when they write a book or paint something that looks like the style of Van Gogh. They're even allowed to generate content for private companies or for sale.
What is different, is that the AI is very good at this and has machine levels of retention and abilities. And companies are poised to get rich off of the computational work. So I'm actually perfectly down with AI's being trained on copyrighted materials as long as they can't recite it directly and in whole, But I feel the models that are created using these techniques should also be in the public domain.
This is the correct answer. Never forget that US copyright law originally allowed for a 14 year (renewable for 14 more years) term. Now copyright holders are able to:
So much in the modern world exists to enable copyright holders, but terms are longer than ever. It's insane.
Oh no...
Anyway...
Piracy is not theft.
When a corporation does it to get a competitive edge, it is.
It’s only theft if they support laws preventing their competitors from doing it too. Which is kind of what OpenAI did, and now they’re walking that idea back because they’re losing again.
Only if it's illegal to begin with. We need to abolish copyright, as with the internet and digital media in general, the concept has become outdated as scarcity isn't really a thing anymore. This also applies to anything that can be digitized.
The original creator can still sell their work and people can still choose to buy it, and people will if it is convenient enough. If it is inconvenient or too expensive, people will pirate it instead, regardless of the law.
Piracy is only theft if AI can't be made profitable.
Yeah but I don't sell ripped dvds and copies of other peoples art.
What if I run a filter over it. Transformative works are fine.
Oh it's "over"? Fine for me
Ho no, what will we do without degenerate generative AIs?!
This is a tough one
Open-ai is full of shit and should die but then again, so should copyright law as it currently is
That's fair, but OpenAI isn't fighting to reform copyright law for everyone. OpenAI wants you to be subject to the same restrictions you currently face, and them to be exempt. This isn't really an "enemy of my enemy" situation.
Is anyone trying to make stronger copyright laws? Wouldn't be rich people that control media would it?
yes, screw them both. let altman scrape all the copyright material and choke on it
Fuck Sam Altmann, the fartsniffer who convinced himself & a few other dumb people that his company really has the leverage to make such demands.
"Oh, but democracy!" - saying that in the US of 2025 is a whole 'nother kind of dumb.
Anyhow, you don't give a single fuck about democracy, you're just scared because a chinese company offers what you offer for a fraction of the price/resources.
Your scared for your government money and basically begging for one more handout "to save democracy".
Yes, I've been listening to Ed Zitron.
gosh Ed Zitron is such an anodyne voice to hear, I felt like I was losing my mind until I listened to some of his stuff
Yeah, he has the ability to articulate what I was already thinking about LLMs and bring in hard data to back up his thesis that it’s all bullshit. Dangerous and expensive bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless.
It’s really sad that his willingness to say the tech industry is full of shit is such an unusual attribute in the tech journalism world.
Fartsniffer 🤣
It seems like their message was written specifically for the biases the current administration holds. Calling China PRC is an obvious example. So it was written by idiots for idiots apparently.
Seems like just yesterday Metallica was suing people for enjoying copyrighted materials
But when China steals all their (arguably not copywrite-able) work...
Sam Altman hasn't complained surprisingly, he just said there's competition and it will be harder for OpenAI to compete with open source. I think their small lead is essentially gone, and their plan is now to suckle Microsoft's teet.
it will be harder for OpenAI to compete with open source
Can we revoke the word open from their name? Please?
What I’m hearing between the lines here is the origin of a legal “argument.”
If a person’s mind is allowed to read copyrighted works, remember them, be inspired by them, and describe them to others, then surely a different type of “person’s” different type of “mind” must be allowed to do the same thing!
After all, corporations are people, right? Especially any worth trillions of dollars! They are more worthy as people than meatbags worth mere billions!
This has been the legal basis of all AI training sets since they began collecting datasets. The US copyright office heard these arguments in 2023: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/listening-sessions.html
MR. LEVEY: Hi there. I'm Curt Levey, President of the Committee for Justice. We're a nonprofit that focuses on a variety of legal and policy issues, including intellectual property, AI, tech policy. There certainly are a number of very interesting questions about AI and copyright. I'd like to focus on one of them, which is the intersection of AI and copyright infringement, which some of the other panelists have already alluded to.
That issue is at the forefront given recent high-profile lawsuits claiming that generative AI, such as DALL-E 2 or Stable Diffusion, are infringing by training their AI models on a set of copyrighted images, such as those owned by Getty Images, one of the plaintiffs in these suits. And I must admit there's some tension in what I think about the issue at the heart of these lawsuits. I and the Committee for Justice favor strong protection for creatives because that's the best way to encourage creativity and innovation.
But, at the same time, I was an AI scientist long ago in the 1990s before I was an attorney, and I have a lot of experience in how AI, that is, the neural networks at the heart of AI, learn from very large numbers of examples, and at a deep level, it's analogous to how human creators learn from a lifetime of examples. And we don't call that infringement when a human does it, so it's hard for me to conclude that it's infringement when done by AI.
Now some might say, why should we analogize to humans? And I would say, for one, we should be intellectually consistent about how we analyze copyright. And number two, I think it's better to borrow from precedents we know that assumed human authorship than to invent the wheel over again for AI. And, look, neither human nor machine learning depends on retaining specific examples that they learn from.
So the lawsuits that I'm alluding to argue that infringement springs from temporary copies made during learning. And I think my number one takeaway would be, like it or not, a distinction between man and machine based on temporary storage will ultimately fail maybe not now but in the near future. Not only are there relatively weak legal arguments in terms of temporary copies, the precedent on that, more importantly, temporary storage of training examples is the easiest way to train an AI model, but it's not fundamentally required and it's not fundamentally different from what humans do, and I'll get into that more later if time permits.
The "temporary storage" idea is pretty central for visual models like Midjourney or DALL-E, whose training sets are full of copyrighted works lol. There is a legal basis for temporary storage too:
The "Ephemeral Copy" Exception (17 U.S.C. § 112 & § 117)
U.S. copyright law recognizes temporary, incidental, and transitory copies as necessary for technological processes.
Section 117 allows temporary copies for software operation.
Section 112 permits temporary copies for broadcasting and streaming.
BTW, if anyone was interested - many visual models use the same training set, collected by a German non-profit: https://laion.ai/
It's "technically not copyright infringement" because the set is just a link to an image, paired with a text description of each image. Because they're just pointing to the image, they don't really have to respect any copyright.
I don't think it's actually such a bad argument because to reject it you basically have to say that style should fall under copyright protections, at least conditionally, which is absurd and has obvious dystopian implications. This isn't what copyright was meant for. People want AI banned or inhibited for separate reasons and hope the copyright argument is a path to that, but even if successful wouldn't actually change much except to make the other large corporations that own most copyright stakeholders of AI systems. That's not actually a better circumstance.
If It Can’t Steal All Your Copyrighted Work
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Copying_Is_Not_Theft.webm
Of course it is if you copy to monetise which is what they do.
They monetize it, erase authorship and bastardize the work.
Like if copyright was to protect against anything, it would be this.
Sam Altman is a lying hype-man. He deserves to see his company fail.
Too bad, so sad
OpenAI can open their asses and go fuck themselves!
This is why they killed that former employee.
Say his name y’all
Suchir Balaji
Sorry, wasn’t trying to be a dick. Just couldn’t think of it at the time.
Obligatory: I'm anti-AI, mostly anti-technology
That said, I can't say that I mind LLMs using copyrighted materials that it accesses legally/appropriately (lots of copyrighted content may be freely available to some extent, like news articles or song lyrics)
I'm open to arguments correcting me. I'd prefer to have another reason to be against this technology, not arguing on the side of frauds like Sam Altman. Here's my take:
All content created by humans follows consumption of other content. If I read lots of Vonnegut, I should be able to churn out prose that roughly (or precisely) includes his idiosyncrasies as a writer. We read more than one author; we read dozens or hundreds over our lifetimes. Likewise musicians, film directors, etc etc.
If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?
Right. The problem is not the fact it consumes the information, the problem is if the user uses it to violate copyright. It’s just a tool after all.
Like, I’m capable of violating copyright in infinitely many ways, but I usually don’t.
The problem is that the user usually can't tell if the AI output is infringing someone's copyright or not unless they've seen all the training data.
If an LLM consumes the same copyrighted content and learns how to copy its various characteristics, how is it meaningfully different from me doing it and becoming a successful writer?
That is the trillion-dollar question, isn’t it?
I’ve got two thoughts to frame the question, but I won’t give an answer.
Yup. Violating IP licenses is a great reason to prevent it. According to current law, if they get Alice license for the book they should be able to use it how they want.
I'm not permitted to pirate a book just because I only intend to read it and then give it back. AI shouldn't be able to either if people can't.
Beyond that, we need to accept that might need to come up with new rules for new technology. There's a lot of people, notably artists, who object to art they put on their website being used for training. Under current law if you make it publicly available, people can download it and use it on their computer as long as they don't distribute it. That current law allows something we don't want doesn't mean we need to find a way to interpret current law as not allowing it, it just means we need new laws that say "fair use for people is not the same as fair use for AI training".
and learns how to copy its various characteristics
Because you are a human. Not an immortal corporation.
I am tired of people trying to have iNtElLeCtUaL dIsCuSsIoN about/with entities that would feed you feet first into a wood chipper if it thought it could profit from it.
Except the reason Altman is so upset has nothing to do with this very valid discussion.
As I commented elsewhere:
Fuck Sam Altmann, the fartsniffer who convinced himself & a few other dumb people that his company really has the leverage to make such demands.
He doesn't care about democracy, he's just scared because a chinese company offers what his company offers, but for a fraction of the price/resources.
He's scared for his government money and basically begging for one more handout “to save democracy”.
Yes, I’ve been listening to Ed Zitron.
In your example, you could also be sued for ripping off his style.
Bye
I feel like it would be ok if AI generated images/text would be clearly marked(but i dont think its possible in the case of text)
Who would support something made stealing the hard work of other people if they could tell instantly
Stealing means the initial item is no longer there
If someone is profiting off someone elses work, i would argue its stealing
China, the new bogeyman to replace the USSR
Has been since 1991
Took a brief break for MENA to be the targeted one though
"Your proposal is acceptable."
Please let it be over, yes.
Nobody even tries to write code from scratch anymore. I think it will have a lot of negative effects on programmers over time.
I think it would be interesting as hell if they had to cite where the data was from on request. See if it's legitimate sources or just what a reddit user said five years ago
Let them. Copyright is bullshit. What's the issue. He's right
Darn