This brings me to the debate over training AI and copyright. A lot of creative workers are justifiably angry and afraid that the AI companies want to destroy creative jobs. The CTO of Openai literally just said that onstage: "Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place":
Many of these workers are accordingly cheering on the entertainment industry's lawsuits over AI training. In these lawsuits, companies like the New York Times and Getty Images claim that the steps associated with training an AI model infringe copyright. This isn't a great copyright theory based on current copyright precedents, and if the suits succeed, they'll narrow fair use in ways that will impact all kinds of socially beneficial activities, like scraping the web to make the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:
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Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers. They don't want to get rid of generative AI, they just want to get paid for the content used to create it. Their use-case for gen AI is the same as Openai's CTO's use-case: get rid of creative jobs and pay less for creative labor.
This isn't hypothetical. Remember last summer's actor strike? The sticking point was that the studios wanted to pay actors a single fee to scan their bodies and faces, and then use those scans instead of hiring those actors, forever, without ever paying them again. Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?
This is true across the board. The Big Five publishers categorically refuse to include contractual language promising not to train an LLM with the books they acquire from writers. The game studios require all their voice actors to start every recording session with an on-tape assignment of the training rights to the session:
And now, with total predictability, Universal – the largest music company in the world – has announced that it will start training voice-clones with the music in its catalog:
It would be really great if someone would do a study on artists' views on generative models & copyright law that also took into account the kind of work they do and their class position. I say "what they do" because doujinshi circles have an interest in weakening intellectual property contrary to other freelance artists, although I'm not sure if this is reflected in reality...
hahahahahaha
He won't win 2028. There hasn't been a bearded president in over a century.