Yeah! I can’t make money running my restaurant if I have to pay for the ingredients, so I should be allowed to steal them. How else can I make money??
Alternatively:
OpenAI is no different from pirate streaming sites in this regard (loosely: streaming sites are way more useful to humanity). If OpenAI gets a pass, so should every site that’s been shut down for piracy.
K, so Google should be shut down too?
They can’t operate without scraping copyrighted data.
Google (and search engines in general) is at least providing a service by indexing and making discoverable the websites they crawl. OpenAI is is just hoovering up the data and providing nothing in return. Socializing the cost, privatizing the profits.
Uh, that’s objectively false.
OoenAI also provides ChatGPT as a “free” service, and Google has made billions off of that “free” service they oh so altruistically provide you.
This is a false equivalency.
Google used to act as a directory for the internet along with other web search services. In court, they argued that the content they scrapped wasn’t easily accessible through the searches alone and had statistical proof that the search engine was helping bring people to more websites, not preventing them from going. At the time, they were right. This was the “good” era of Google, a different time period and company entirely.
Since then, Google has parsed even more data, made that data easily available in the google search results pages directly (avoiding link click-throughs), increased the number of services they provide to the degree that they have a conflict of interest on the data they collect and a vested interest in keeping people “on google” and off the other parts of the web, and participated in the same bullshit policies that OpenAI started with their Gemini project. Whatever win they had in the 2000s against book publishers, it could be argued that the rights they were “afforded” back in those days were contingent on them being good-faith participants and not competitors. OpenAI and “summary” models that fail to reference sources with direct links, make hugely inaccurate statements, and generate “infinite content” by mashing together letters in the worlds most complicated markov chain fit in this category.
It turns out, if you’re afforded the rights to something on a technicality, it’s actually pretty dumb to become brazen and assume that you can push these rights to the breaking point.
If OpenAI wants a pass, then just like how piracy services make content freely open and available, they should make their models open.
Give me the weights, publish your datasets, slap on a permissive license.
If you’re not willing to contribute back to society with what you used from it, then you shouldn’t exist within society until you do so.
Generative AI is not going back into the bag. If not OpenAI, then someone else will control it. So we deal with them the next best way, force them to serve us, the people.
Piracy steals from the rich and gives to the poor. ChatGPT steals from the rich and the poor and keeps for itself.
and keeps for itself.
Which is why they should be legally compelled to publicize all of their datasets, models, research, and share any profits they’ve made with the works they can get provenance data for, because otherwise, it’s an unfair use of the public sphere of content.
One could very easily argue that adblockers are piracy, and those would be stealing from every social media creator, small blog, and independent news site, but I don’t see many people arguing against that, even though that very well includes people who aren’t wealthy corporations.
The issue isn’t necessarily the use of the copyrighted content, it’s the unfair legal stance taken on who can use the content, and how they are allowed to profit (or not profit) from it.
I’m not saying there are no downsides, but I do feel like a simple black and white dichotomy doesn’t properly outline how piracy and generative AI training are relatively similar in terms of who they steal from, and it’s more of a matter of what is done with the content after it is taken that truly matters most.
This is actually a very good comparison because restaurants use this argument all the time, except for wages:
“I can’t make money running my restaurant if I have to pay a living wage to my servers, so you should pay them with tips. How else can we stay open?”
These business that can’t operate profitably like any other business should fail.
