The Private Capture of Public Genius

Author fears pending/future copyright litigation against AI labs, proposes "Corpus Royalty"

Even if the UN only has a very small amount of legitimacy and credibility… that’s still far far better than literally zero.

There are over 190 nations in the UN. Even if we assume a chunk have no credible claim whatsoever, that’s still well over a hundred.

I’m talking about training data, and so is the parent.

I think Google's AI results are probably the prime example here. Those results are often quite good, and starve off the visits and hence revenue stream of the sites where the results are sourced from. Additionally, there's no way to robustly attribute that information anymore either; those links were already broken pre-AI by freeloading aggregators. So potential information producers can't afford to host their valuable information since they will pay proportionally to their information's value (as translated into bandwidth).

But it's tricky. If you charge AI companies proportional to the damage they do, then you need to assess that damage and you'll be caught in a no-win cat & mouse game where the AI companies outsource the damage and you try to track it back to them. They win if they bump their revenue, but they also win if they conceal the damage. (Just like companies can use shell companies, bankruptcy, and asset-only purchases to avoid Superfund responsibility.) If you charge proportional to revenue, then there aren't conflicting incentives; companies win by increasing revenue full stop. But I do agree that this shouldn't just apply to the big companies; distillation / model extraction (adversarial or not) should not be a way to avoid fees.

Though what really seemed off to me about the proposed solution was the use of the fees (to pay Americans, no less!) Perhaps upcoming essays will justify this more, but to me it seems like those fees should be applied directly to the health of the ecosystem. It should be used to fight pollution, in this case AI slop overtaking the Web. It should support the value creators, eg open source developers being overwhelmed by the AI tsunami. It should go towards serving and moderating online communities that create the very value that the LLMs are trained from. In theory, paying a whole bunch of Americans a trickle of blood money will end up going towards these purposes, but I'm very skeptical: first, the benefit will be very diluted. Second, it's more likely that the excess money will end up in Google or Amazon's pockets. The whole system is already set up to route any advantage to the big players. The payments are at least as likely to damage the ecosystem as they are to support it. They would just feed the capitalistic wolf and further reinforce the setup where monetizers win and value creators lose. If you could magically route the money to value creators, that'd be great. But you can't.

It'd be ok to pour money into a bucket if it had a small hole or two, but pouring it faster into the sieve we have now is not going to help anything.