Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would 'kill' AI industry

>some artists' livelihood

There I fixed it for you. If it's such a net benefit to humanity governments should provide 6-months-behind-the-state-of-the-art-model for free to the public to make up for the highway robbery of its citizens' lifelong digital output.

I didn’t know that OpenAI employed all of the artists that they were training models in. Problem solved!

For people who don’t know the UK backstory, Nick Clegg is a widely-derided figure in the UK. He was the leader of the 3rd biggest party (the liberal democrats) and by making an alliance with the conservatives to let David Cameron become prime minister and then going along (as deputy prime minister) with a number of policies [1] that were seen by supporters of his party as anathema to their basic principles, saw his party utterly destroyed in the next election to the extent where they went from being a credible political force to having few enough members of parliament where they could all have fit into a US—style SUV and not been too cramped. He didn’t care because he peaced out immediately and took the Zuck dollar.

All of which to say if Nick Clegg says X there are a very large number of people who think “not X” by default. He’s even a lame duck at meta because they’re ditching him to replace him with Joel Kaplan who they think will help in their attempts to cosy up further with the Trump administration.

[1] Tuition fees for tertiary education in particular https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/libdems-tuition-fe...

If your premise was right, it makes even less sense as a justification for using other peoples' IP without compensation.

AI companies are for profit organizations in a largely capitalist world. If what they're providing is so massively more valuable to humanity than artists' IP, then the AI companies should easily be able to monetize that value in a way that allows them to fairly compensate the artists for the crucial role they're apparently playing in AI development.

Of course scale is the real problem here, because we're not just talking about AI companies compensating "some artists", but likely "all artists". This probably is financially untenable since the current value AI is providing to society seems unlikely to be greater than the value of all IP that exists in the world.

But that's not some critical feature of AI, it just speaks to the way current AI models work where you take every bit of text and images that exists and throw it into a data center full of GPUs to burn through a large city's worth of electricity until something approximating human text and image generation pops out. Arguably that approach is driven by the fact that GPUs and electricity are affordable and the input data is "free" if you're willing to steal it. I see no reason to believe less wasteful models couldn't produce good results without requiring the input being all human knowledge, and you'd save some electricity and resources in the meantime.

Edit: I'm not an AI researcher, but I also think incentivizing more efficient approaches to AI model development and training might yield more human-like AI (i.e. actual AI rather than turbo charged autocomplete). Humans also develop our cognitive abilities by absorbing external information but we manage to do it by absorbing a fraction of the information as a large-scale AI model with significantly better results. Focusing on whatever difference is behind that rather than building ever larger data centers with ever more powerful GPUs might be an interesting shift.

We have copyright laws to protect innovation as have deemed it as a society (for the most part) to be important, but there is no fundamental right to the protection of information. So the question now is: is it worth protecting the rights of innovators at the expense of whatever benefits that AI provides?