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.”
I don’t think it should go unquestioned that the same standards should apply. No human is able to look at billions of creative works and then create a million new works in an hour. There’s a meaningfully different level of scale here, and so it’s not necessarily obvious that the same standards should apply.
A fundamental issue is that LLMs simply cannot do this. They can query a webpage, find a relevant chunk, and spit that back at you with a citation, but it is simply impossible for them to actually generate a response to a query, realize that they’ve generated a meaningful amount of copyrighted material, and disclose its source, because it literally does not know its source. This is not a fixable issue unless the fundamental approach to these models changes.