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.”
It’s bizarre. People suddenly start voicing pro-copyright arguments just to kill an useful technology, when we should be trying to burn copyright to the fucking ground. Copyright is a tool for the rich and it will remain so until it is dismantled.
Life plus 70 years is bullshit.
20 years from release date is not.
No one except corporate bigwigs will say they should be allowed to do so in perpetuity, but artists still need legal protections to make money off of what they create, and Midjourney (making OpenAI boatloads of money off of making automated collages from artwork they obtained not only without compensation but without attribution) is a prime example of why.
The creative industries are hyper-oversaturated. The only creatives (music, graphic artists, writers, whatever) that make it and make any sort of money out of it are the 1% of the 1% that end up earning millions out of it. Copyright only benefits them and the corporations they work for.
It would benefit smaller artists too if we enforced it when OpenAI was looking for training data.