OpenAI Says It's "Over" If It Can't Steal All Your Copyrighted Work

Either that, or copyright law is bad in its current form and LLM’s are yet an example of what exposes that.

Even if copyright owners can’t point to how much damage, if any, they suffer from AI, it’s seen as wrong and bad. I think it’s getting boring to hear that story about copyright repeat itself. In most crimes, you need to be able point to a damage that was done to you.

Also, while there are edge cases in some LLM’s where you can make them spew some verbatim training material, often through jailbreaks or whatnot, an LLM is a destructive process involving ”fuzzy logic” where the content is generally not perfectly memorized, and seems no more of a threat to copyright than recording broadcasts onto cassette tapes or VHS were back in the day. You’d be insane to use that stuff as a source of truth on par with the original article etc.

something tells me that this pathetic messaging approach is not going to be the one that squares the circle between "piracy is illegal" and "information wants to be free"

What I don't understand is why this is always presented as a "race" that "we" have to win or else. It's just such a strange framing to me and every time I see it, it's presented as some sort of self-evident truth, but I don't think it's self-evident at all.

Yes, well, in a way they're right and I suspect everyone here knows it no matter how and mighty they might want act when commenting. When foreign (here 'Chinese') competition just ignores copyright laws while 'western' companies have to abide by them for every piece of data they use to train their models the former will have a clear advantage over the latter. This also happens to be how the USA acted in the 1800s [1]:

the United States declined an invitation to a pivotal conference in Berne in 1883, and did not sign the 1886 agreement of the Berne Convention which accorded national treatment to copyright holders. Moreover, until 1891 American statutes explicitly denied copyrights to citizens of other countries and the United States was notorious in the international sphere as a significant contributor to the "piracy" of foreign literary products. It has been claimed that American companies for the most part "indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement" (Feather, 1994, 154). The tendency to freely reprint foreign works was encouraged by the existence of tariffs on imported books that ranged as high as 25 percent (see Dozer, 1949).

[1] http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_artte...

You have to remember a company is not a social being with balanced obligations. Its obligation is to its owners and not to society.

If OpenAI’s leadership weren’t saying precisely this, they wouldn’t be doing their jobs.