OpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free
OpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free
OpenAI is begging Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it's "impossible" for the company to make money without them.
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.
I can't make money without using OpenAI's paid products for free.
Checkmate motherfucker
Boo fucking hoo. Everyone else has to make licensing agreements for this kind of shit, pay up.
Then OpenAI shouldn’t exist. That’s capitalism.
Hey, me either. I guess I can steal too.
"WE'RE NOT A VIABLE BUSINESS! BWAH!"
Oh. Oh no. Such a shame.
Honestly, that sounds like a You problem, Sam.
It is impossible for my turnip soup business to make money if you enforce laws that make it illegal for me to steal turnips.
Paying for turnips is not realistic.
You bureaucrats don't understand food.
I stand by my opinion that learning systems training on copyrighted materials isn't the problem, it's companies super eager to replace human workers with automation (or replace skilled workers with cheaper, unskilled workers). The problem is, every worker not working is another adult (and maybe some kids) not eating and not paying rent.
(And for those of you soulless capitalists out there, people without food and shelter is bad. That's a thing we won't tolerate and start looking at you lean-and-hungry-like when it happens. That's what gets us thinking about guillotines hungry for aristocrats.)
In my ideal world, everyone would have food, shelter, clothes, entertainment and a general middle-class lifestyle whether they worked or not, and intellectual-property temporary monopolies would be very short and we'd have a huge public domain. I think the UN wants to be on the same page as me, but the United States and billionaires do not.
All we'd have to worry about is the power demands of AI and cryptomining, which might motivate us to get pure-hydrogen fusion working. Or just keep developing solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power until everyone can run their AC and supercomputer.
Bet they get the pass that the Internet Archive didn't.
So... they are a non-profit (as they initially were) or a public research lab then. That would perfectly fine to say the path that they chose and so happen to make them unbelievably rich, is not viable.
They don't have a business if they can't legally make profit, it's not that hard. I'm sure people who are pursing superhuman intelligence can figure out that much, if not they can ask their "AI" some help to understand.
What a joke.
He has committed the greatest crime imaginable! A crime against capitalism!
I don’t mind him using copyrighted materials as long as it leads to OpenAI becoming truly open source. Humans can replicate anything found in the wild with minor variations, so AI should have the same access. This is how human creativity builds upon itself. Why limit AI? We already know all the jobs people have will be replaced anyway eventually.
Even I should get a pass to view copyrighted movies and songs. I need it to train AI (Actual Intelligence).
oh no! We'll miss you, bye.
Fuck OpenAI. I hope they fail.
But I NEED to break the law.
Well, alright then. As long as it's for business.
Cool, so if openAI can do it, that means piracy is legal?
How about we just drastically limit copyright length to something much more reasonable, like the original 14 year duration w/ an optional one-time renewal for another 14 years.That should give AI companies a large corpus to train an AI with, while also protecting recent works from abuse. Perhaps we can round down to 10 years instead, which should still be more than enough for copyright holders to establish their brand on the market.
I think copyright has value, but I don't think it has as much value as we're giving it.
So…. not a legitimate business then.
For what it's worth, this headline seems to be editorialized and OpenAI didn't say anything about money or profitability in their arguments.
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/126981/pdf/
On point 4 they are specifically responding to an inquiry about the feasibility of training models on public domain only and they are basically saying that an LLM trained on only that dataset would be shit. But their argument isn't "you should allow it because we couldn't make money otherwise" their actual argument is more "training LLM with copyrighted material doesn't violate current copyright laws" and further if we changed the law to forbid that it would cripple all LLMs.
On the one hand I think most would agree the current copyright laws are a bit OP anyway - more stuff should probably become public domain much earlier for instance - but most of the world probably also doesn't think training LLMs should be completely free from copyright restrictions without being opensource etc. But either way this articles title was absolute shit.
Sounds a lot like a “you” problem, OpenAI.
For years Microsoft and Google were happy to acquiesce to copyright claims from the music and movie industry. Now all of a sudden when it benefits them to break those same laws, they immediately did. And now those industries who served small creators copyright claims are up against someone with a bigger legal budget.
It's more evident then ever how broken our copyright system is. I'm hoping this blows up in both parties faces and we finally get some reform but I'm not holding my breath.
This is an assumption but I bet all the data feed into Content ID on YouTube was used to train Bard/Gemini....
Sounds like the free market has spoken. Please die quickly, ""AI"" industry
Sam Altman has the same creepy vibe as Elon Musk.
…………. Then the business is a failure and the company should go bankrupt
Well alright then, that means you have the wrong business model, sucks to be you, NEXT.
I wish these people would just chill with the hypermonetization of literally goddamn everything
boohoo
Copyright regulations for thee but not for me
Oh, do you support copyright abolition, then?
"because it's supposedly "impossible" for the company to train its artificial intelligence models — and continue growing its multi-billion-dollar-business — without them."
O no! Poor richs cant get more rich fast enough :(
The gall of these motherfuckers is truly astonishing. To be either so incredibly out of touch, or so absolutely shameless, makes me wanna call up every single school bully I ever endured to get their very best bullying tips
Oh no. Anyway...
Wow, that's a shame. Anyway, take all his money and throw him in a ditch someplace.
Shut it down then and stop stealing other peoples shit
Get Fucked
What irks me most about this claim from OpenAI and others in the AI industry is that it's not based on any real evidence. Nobody has tested the counterfactual approach he claims wouldn't work, yet the experiments that came closest--the first StarCoder LLM and the CommonCanvas text-to-image model--suggest that, in fact, it would have been possible to produce something very nearly as useful, and in some ways better, with a more restrained training data curation approach than scraping outbound Reddit links.
All that aside, copyright clearly isn't the right framework for understanding why what OpenAI does bothers people so much. It's really about "data dignity", which is a relatively new moral principle not yet protected by any single law. Most people feel that they should have control over what data is gathered about their activities online, as well as what is done with those data after it's been collected, and even if they publish or post something under a Creative Commons license that permits derived uses of their work, they'll still get upset if it's used as an input to machine learning. This is true even if the generative models thereby created are not created for commercial reasons, but only for personal or educational purposes that clearly constitute fair use. I'm not saying that OpenAI's use of copyrighted work is fair, I'm just saying that even in cases where the use is clearly fair, there's still a perceived moral injury, so I don't think it's wise to lean too heavily on copyright law if we want to find a path forward that feels just.
What kind of a pathetic statement is that ?
It's impossible for me to make money without robbing a bank, please let me do that parliament it would be so funny
Honestly, copyright is shit. It is created on the basis of an old way of doing things. That is, where big editors and big studios make mass productions of physical copies of a said 'product'. George R. R. Martin , Warner Studios & co are rich. Maybe they have everything to lose without their copy'right' but that isn't the population's problem. We live in an era where everything is digital and easily copiable and we might as well start acting like it.
I don't care if Sam Altman is evil, this discussion is fundamental.
We can't make money paying for "AI", going to theaters, or paying for streaming services.
So I guess everybody gets a piracy!
Sounds like they need better bootstraps.
Or at least a business model.
“Too fucking bad”
Idk, usually people shut down their business if it can't make a profit...
Sorry not sorry. Found another company that does not need to rob people and other companies to make money. Also: breaking the law should make this kind of people face grim consequences. But nothing will happen.
Aww poor shit company and their poor money problems.
I maintain my insistence that you owe me a business model!
The internet has been primarily derivative content for a long time. As much as some haven't wanted to admit it. It's true. These fancy algorithms now take it to the exponential factor.
Original content had already become sparsely seen anymore as monetization ramped up. And then this generation of AI algorithms arrived.
The several years before prior to LLMs becoming a thing, the internet was basically just regurgitating data from API calls or scraping someone else's content and representing it in your own way.
Unregulated areas lead to these type of business practices where the people will squeeze out the juices of these opportunities. The cost of these activities will be passed on the taxpayers.
Ok... Is that supposed to be a good reason?
"I loose money when I pay for Netflix."
If they win, we can just train a CNN on a single 4k hdr movie until it's extremely fitted, and then it's legal to redistribute
Then go out of business.
Literally, "fuck you go die" situation.
As written the headline is pretty bad, but it seems their argument is that they should be able to train from publicly available copywritten information, like blog posts and social media, and not from private copywritten information like movies or books.
You can certainly argue that "downloading public copywritten information for the purposes of model training" should be treated differently from "downloading public copywritten information for the intended use of the copyright holder", but it feels disingenuous to put this comment itself, to which someone has a copyright, into the same category as something not shared publicly like a paid article or a book.
Personally, I think it's a lot like search engines. If you make something public someone can analyze it, link to it, or derivative actions, but they can't copy it and share the copy with others.
well fuck you Sam Altman
I feel we need a term for "copyright bros".
The more important point is that social media companies can claim to OWN all the content needed to train AI. Same for image sites. That means they get to own the AI models. That means the models will never be free. Which means they control the "means of generation". That means that forever and ever and ever most human labour will be worth nothing while we can't even legally use this power. Double fucked.
YOU the user/product will not gain anything with this copyright strongmanning.
And to the argument itself: Just because AI is better at learning from existing works, faster, more complete, better memory, doesn't meant that it's fundamentally different than humans learning from artwork. Almost EVERY artist arguing for this is stealing themselves since they learned and was inspired by existing works.
But I guess the worst possible outcome is inevitable now.
If he wins this, I guess everyone should just make their Jellyfin servers public.
Because if rich tech bros get to opt out of our copyright system, I don't see why the hell normal people have to abide by it.
Hello from our companies "we finally need to get more AI" executive conference. I got find a way to get out of this corporate bullshit...
"We are falling behind" my ass.
Perhaps they should go back to what they were before the greed machine was spun up.
If they get this, I'm gonna make s fortune ripping the copyright protection off stuff so that I can sell products as my own.
So this is an open source public utility, right?
Suck it, don't care, go back to obscurity
My goodness! This is unfair! What kind of Mickey Mouse rule is this anyway?!
Awwww 😢
Right now, you can draw the line easily. There will come a time, not to far in the future where machines reading and summarizing copy written data will be the norm.
It's doesnt have to change yet, but eventually this will have to be properly handled.
We're all just horse owners bitching about how cars will just have to be stopped.
No, they can make money without stealing. They just choose to steal and lie about it either way. It's the worst kind of justification.
The investors are predominantly made up of the Rationalist Society. It doesn't matter whether or not AI "makes money". It matters that the development is steered as quickly as possible towards an end product of producing as much propaganda as possible.
The bottom line barely even matters in the bigger picture. If you're paying someone to make propaganda, and the best way to do that is to steal from the masses, then they'll do it regardless of whether or not the business model is "profitable" or not.
The lines drawn for AI are drawn by people who want to use it for misinformation and control. The justifications make it seem like the lines were drawn around a monetary system. No, that's wrong.
Who cares about profitability when people are paying you under the table to run a mass crime ring.
Criminals Plead That They Can't Make Money Without Stealing Materials for Free.
This headline sounded familiar. The article's from 8 months ago, folks.
I do not care. Get a real job.
What crimes can I get away with using the same idea?
I can't have a chill movie night at home with friends without being able to pirate movies for free.
And my money redistribution company can not get money to redistribute without robbing banks. Please put up your hands. 🔫🥷
this is probably true
LOooOoOL
thats some napster funny shit
slaps roof of coffin
So what would it take to get you in one of these?
Bad luck.
its a threat. they hold the biggest players to ransom by demanding exclusive contracts. otherwise business goes to china, russia and qatar
Wow, I just chatted with a coworker about AI, and I told them it was crazy how it uses copyrighted content to create something supposedly “new,” and they said “well how would we train the AI without it?” I don’t think we should sacrifice copyright laws and originality for the sake of improving profits as they tell us it’s only to “improve the experience.”
That gonna be fun if they manage to make movie makin AI and suddenly all actors appear on the resulting content Big money vs big money 😮
Now now, I am sure what he meant was they can't make enough profit to bring billions for its shareholders
These people are supposedly the smart people in our society. The leaders of industry, but they whine and complain when they are told not to cheat or break the law.
If y'all are so smart, then figure out a different way of creating an A.I. Maybe the large language model, or whatever, isn't the approach you should use. 🤦♂️
Too bad for Open AI then. (I thought they were already using copyrighted materials)
Shamed be he who thinks naughty of it. 🤣
Yeah, but because our government views technological dominance as a National Security issue we can be sure that this will come to nothing bc China Bad™.
I can already tell this is going to be a unpopular opinion judging by the comments but this is my ideology on it
it's totally true. I'm indifferent on it, if it was acquired by a public facing source I don't really care, but like im definitly against using data dumps or data that wasn't available to the public in the first place. The whole thing with AI is rediculous, it's the same as someone going to a website and making a mirror, or a reporter making an article that talks about what's in it, last three web search based AI's even gave sources for where it got the info. I don't get the argument.
if it's image based AI, well it's the equivalent to an artist going to an art museum and deciding they want to replicate the art style seen in a painting. Maybe they shouldn't be in a publishing field if they don't want their work seen/used. That's my ideology on it it's not like the AI is taking a one-to-one copy and selling the artwork as , which in my opinion is a much more harmful instance and already happens commonly in today's art world, it's analyzing existing artwork which was available through the same means that everyone else had of going online loading up images and scraping the data. By this logic, artist should not be allowed to enter any art based websites museums or galleries, since by looking at others are they are able to adjust their own art which is stealing the author's work. I'm not for or against it but, the ideology is insane to me.
Those claiming AI training on copyrighted works is "theft" are misunderstanding key aspects of copyright law and AI technology. Copyright protects specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves. When AI systems ingest copyrighted works, they're extracting general patterns and concepts - the "Bob Dylan-ness" or "Hemingway-ness" - not copying specific text or images.
This process is more akin to how humans learn by reading widely and absorbing styles and techniques, rather than memorizing and reproducing exact passages. The AI discards the original text, keeping only abstract representations in "vector space". When generating new content, the AI isn't recreating copyrighted works, but producing new expressions inspired by the concepts it's learned.
This is fundamentally different from copying a book or song. It's more like the long-standing artistic tradition of being influenced by others' work. The law has always recognized that ideas themselves can't be owned - only particular expressions of them.
Moreover, there's precedent for this kind of use being considered "transformative" and thus fair use. The Google Books project, which scanned millions of books to create a searchable index, was found to be legal despite protests from authors and publishers. AI training is arguably even more transformative.
While it's understandable that creators feel uneasy about this new technology, labeling it "theft" is both legally and technically inaccurate. We may need new ways to support and compensate creators in the AI age, but that doesn't make the current use of copyrighted works for AI training illegal or unethical.
