Earlier quoted context omitted.
If "people who made this possible" were getting their fair share, "a millionth of a cent for every billion USD made with it" would be about it for the artists. What makes the dataset valuable isn't that the image 0012992 in it is precious and irreplaceable. It's that the index goes to seven digits. Pre-training is very much a matter of scale - and scraping is merely the easiest way to get data at scale. People who co…
The ideal world would be one where, to train on art, you have to buy a license to that art. Sure, for most artists they would maybe put a low price tag, but that isn't the point. The point isn't about money. It's that copies were made, without license and without permission, and without any legal right to do so, of art, and then used to train a system which generates similar art. The first step, the copy, is illegal…
"Fair use" counters "without license and without permission" hard. The argument that training AI on scraped data is "fair use" and the resulting model outputs are "transformative works" has held up in courts. Anthropic got dinged for downloading pirated books, but not for throwing the ones they didn't pirate down the training pipeline.
Some countries, like Japan, have amended their copyright laws to make AI training categorically legal. Others are in "fair use clauses" grey areas with courts deciding case by case based on precedent and interpretation. So trying to latch onto copyright law is, as it always was, the wrong move. Copyright never favored the small guy. Stupid to expect that it suddenly will.