Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
This isn’t about scraping the internet. The internet is full of crap and the LLMs will add even more crap to it. It will shortly become exponentially harder to find the meaningful content on the internet.
No, this is about dipping into high quality, curated content. OpenAI wants to be able to use all existing human artwork without paying anything for it, and then flood the world with cheap knockoff copies. It’s that simple.
Shortly? It’s happening already. I notice it when using Google and Duckduckgo. There are always a few hits that are AI written blog spam word soup
Unfortunately you haven’t seen the full impact of LLMs yet. What you’re seeing now is stuff that’s already been going on for a decade. SEO content generators have been a thing for many years and used by everybody from small business owners to site chains pinching ad pennies.
When the LLM crap will kick in you won’t see anything except their links. I wouldn’t be surprised if we’ll have to go back to 90s tech and use human-curated webrings and directories.
It’s especially amusing when you consider that it’s not even fully autonomous yet; we’re actively doing this to ourselves.