OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it's supposedly "impossible" for the company to train its artificial intelligence models — and continue growing its multi-billion-dollar business — without them...
It’s impossible for me to make money in my “selling other people’s copyrighted materials without their permission or without paying them” business as well, can British parliament do something for me?
This is the correct position. On the longer and larger scale, IP is the much more powerful regressive aspect. OpenAI is damaging to the environment, but some other company is gonna find some shitty way to do the damaging stuff they're doing regardless of the method of profiting off it. The positive effects of damaging copyright are way larger than the slight shift which OpenAIs failure would have
It's impossible for my "Sitting on my ass while Sam Altman sends me $1000 a day" business to make money without Sam Altman sending me $1000 a day. Do the right thing, Sam. For business.
If a burglar went to the British Parliament and asked to be allowed to loot other people's properties because his entire business model depends on it, the only difference would be that the burglar is a two-bit sack of shit, while Sam Altman is a billionnaire sack of shit.
Bit idea: the moves all their illicit activities onto a smartphone app and rebrands themselves as a fintech startup. Then whenever the law tries to stop them they lobby to congress that the oppressive regulatory regime is hindering technological progress.
How would someone even go about finding out their specific creative work has been scraped and stolen by these AI companies? Back when I was active people would just steal my [commissioned] work outright and claim they were me. Now it's buried under a thousand layers of algorithmically-generated bullshit that itself is based on previously referenced work.
The "I made this" comic pops into my head on a weekly basis now.