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.
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.
Chinese companies will train their models on all the data they can get their hands on. We can make USA companies act ethically, but then they would become irrelevant. The "safeguards" they were made to implement already makes them less useful than comparable Chinese models. A few more years on that trajectory and we won't have to worry about them anymore
There's no sense in worrying how closely the university aligns real policy with various theoretical economic ideals.
If we allow copyright law to directly inhibit technological advancement then we defeat the very purpose of copyright law.
That said, it need not inhibit if they just pay for using it. Hopefully they will sue for reasonable compensation, noting that they have such a privilege only in a handful of countries so any restriction is strictly a restriction on those countries, which is a huge technological advantage for all the rest.
Yes, just give me my food ration comrade. It is all I need to keep making art for the glory of The Party and it's Supreme Leader. Everything I do I do for the glory of AI. AI is progress!
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.
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.
Here's the bottom line for me, take two llms, train one on copyrighted materials, do not train the other at all. now, I'm wondering here, which llm will be more sellable, more able to answer questions etc?
How about those music AIs, why aren't they training on classical music and theory textbooks? Why are they being accused of training on copyrighted music? I remember one chat about music AIs, the proponent/enthusiast mentioned "creating" a song by using "johnny cash" in the prompt to get a song in that distinctive style.
I will be the first to admit how useful these AIs are, while I don't use them to "create music", I sure as heck have used them for chats and to write programs. I'm not one of those naysayers talking about the outputs being crap because despite some errors here and there, I've found great utility from these things and I don't even mess with "frontier models" from openai or anthropic. My gripes are about the costs about what we're doing here.
When chatting about "fair use", we can go with the legal definitions which are clear as mud, but I think a better and more sensible path forward would be to consider all the ramifications of their use. Even the term "fair use" implies results much better than we're actually seeing, the economic forces in play here do not seem fair at all.
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.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791
This article is trash, but this ruling is just about the outputs of AI.
For use as training data you still need some right to it AFAICT.
Chinese companies will train their models on all the data they can get their hands on. We can make USA companies act ethically, but then they would become irrelevant. The "safeguards" they were made to implement already makes them less useful than comparable Chinese models. A few more years on that trajectory and we won't have to worry about them anymore
Reuters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49538820
NY Times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49543821
So copyright is now effectively dead ?
What's mine is yours, comrade!!!!
The CCP adopted capitalism too.
There's no sense in worrying how closely the university aligns real policy with various theoretical economic ideals.
If we allow copyright law to directly inhibit technological advancement then we defeat the very purpose of copyright law.
That said, it need not inhibit if they just pay for using it. Hopefully they will sue for reasonable compensation, noting that they have such a privilege only in a handful of countries so any restriction is strictly a restriction on those countries, which is a huge technological advantage for all the rest.
I try to see both sides.
Yes, just give me my food ration comrade. It is all I need to keep making art for the glory of The Party and it's Supreme Leader. Everything I do I do for the glory of AI. AI is progress!
[dead]
[flagged]
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...
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.
Here's the bottom line for me, take two llms, train one on copyrighted materials, do not train the other at all. now, I'm wondering here, which llm will be more sellable, more able to answer questions etc?
How about those music AIs, why aren't they training on classical music and theory textbooks? Why are they being accused of training on copyrighted music? I remember one chat about music AIs, the proponent/enthusiast mentioned "creating" a song by using "johnny cash" in the prompt to get a song in that distinctive style.
I will be the first to admit how useful these AIs are, while I don't use them to "create music", I sure as heck have used them for chats and to write programs. I'm not one of those naysayers talking about the outputs being crap because despite some errors here and there, I've found great utility from these things and I don't even mess with "frontier models" from openai or anthropic. My gripes are about the costs about what we're doing here.
When chatting about "fair use", we can go with the legal definitions which are clear as mud, but I think a better and more sensible path forward would be to consider all the ramifications of their use. Even the term "fair use" implies results much better than we're actually seeing, the economic forces in play here do not seem fair at all.