The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

Wouldn’t those dozen outlets suffer the same harms of producing original content, costing time and talent, and while having a significant portion of the benefit accruing to downstream AI companies?

If most of the benefit of producing original content accrues to the AI firms, won’t original content stop being produced?

If original content stops being produced, how will AI models get better in the future?

I personally think that giving copyright holders control over who is legally allowed to view a work that has been made publicly available is a huge step in the wrong direction. One of those reasons is open source, but really that argument applies just as well to making sure that smaller companies have a chance of competing.

I think it makes much more sense to go after the infringing uses of models rather than putting in another barrier that will further advantage the big players in this space.

Would it be more rigorous for AI to cite its sources? Sure, but the same could be said for humans too. Wikipedia editors, scholars, and scientists all still struggle with proper citations. NYT itself has been caught plagiarizing[1].

But that doesn't really solve the underlying issue here: That our copyright laws and monetization models predate the Internet and the ease of sharing/paywall bypass/piracy. The models that made sense when publishing was difficult and required capital-intensive presses don't necessarily make sense in the copy and paste world of today. Whether it's journalists or academics fighting over scraps just for first authorship (while some random web dev makes 3x more money on ad tracking), it's just not a long-term sustainable way to run an information economy.

I'd also argue that attribution isn't really that important to most people to begin with. Stuff, real and fake, gets shared on social media all the time with limited fact-checking (for better or worse). In general, people don't speak in a rigorous scholarly way. And people are often wrong, with faulty memories, or even incentivized falsehoods. Our primate brains aren't constantly in fact-checking mode and we respond better to emotional, plot-driven narratives than cold statistics. There are some intellectuals who really care deeply about attributions, but most humans won't.

Taken the above into consideration:

1) Useful AI does not necessarily require attribution

2) AI piracy is just a continuation of decades of digital piracy, and the solutions that didn't work in the 1990s and 2000s still won't work against AI

3) We need some better way to fund human creativity, especially as it gets more and more commoditized

4) This is going to happen with or without us. Cat's outta the bag.

I don't think using old IP law to hold us back is really going to solve anything in the long term. Yes, it'd be classy of OpenAI to pay everyone it sourced from, but long term that doesn't matter. Creativity has always been shared and copied and imitated and stolen, the only question is whether the creators get compensated (or even enriched) in the meantime. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but it happens regardless. There'll always be noncommercial posts by the billions of people who don't care if AI, or a search engine, or Twitter, or whoever, profits off them.

If we get anywhere remotely close to AGI, a lot of this won't matter. Our entire economic and legal systems will have to be redone. Maybe we can finally get rid of the capitalist and lawyer classes. Or they'll probably just further enslave the rest of us with the help of their robo-bros, giving AI more rights than poor people.

But either way, this is way bigger than the economics of 19th-century newspapers...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair#Plagiarism_and_fa...