Generative AI is generating astronomical profits by trampling authors and publishers (from Authors Guild CEO & others)

[highplainsdem]

Opinion piece in The Hill from, respectively by order of names listed, the CEOs of Association of American Publishers, The Authors Guild and News Media Alliance.

https://thehill.com/opinion/4624330-generative-ai-is-generating-astronomical-profits-by-trampling-authors-and-publishers/

Generative AI is generating astronomical profits by trampling authors and publishers
BY MARIA PALLANTE, MARY RASENBERGER AND DANIELLE COFFEY, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS - 04/26/24 2:30 PM ET

World IP Day is typically a moment each April when authors and publishers around the globe celebrate the importance of copyright law to the creative economy and long-term public interest. But this year we are fighting policy battles that are unprecedented if not existential in scope, as big tech companies double down on their refusal to pay for the scores of creative works that fuel their highly profitable, consumer-facing Generative AI tools.

These big tech companies and their investors—the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful companies in the world— have blatantly copied, scraped and otherwise appropriated troves of protected literature, news media publications, and other original authorship—without transparency or apology—to accelerate their own commercial interests. As reported by CNN, some companies pillaged the Books3 database, a pirate collection, which contains some 183,000 in-copyright works. Others have been secretive about the sources they used, but researchers have deduced that they downloaded massive numbers of books from other notorious pirate sites. Indisputably, they copied proprietary content from media and news services, including scraping millions of articles from behind the New York Times paywall.

Generative AI tools are exciting, but they also pose serious risks that require entirely new levels of legal and ethical safeguards. Europe has approached this exercise with an urgency that is appropriate but still unfolding as to implementation of the 2024 EU AI Act by member states. Here in the United States, discussions are underway, but the development, use, and deployment of AI remain woefully under-regulated. Copyright is a key part of regulation, as neither the tools nor corresponding profits of big tech would be possible at all if not for the immeasurably valuable authorship that permits the technology to generate—or, more aptly, regenerate—the coherent, intelligent text of human expression, including, in some cases, outputs that may act as market substitutes.

There is nothing fair or ethical about ignoring this foundation, or the obvious rights of authors and publishers to recoup their intellectual and financial investments when their works are in demand. On the contrary, the Copyright Act has long prioritized the contributions of authors to society by granting them a bundle of exclusive rights to their works, which they may license or, in their judgement, decline to license, to others for fair payment, including the rights to reproduce their works or create derivative works from them.

-snip-

More at the link.

If the GenAI companies were forced to destroy their current AI models that are based on all the intellectual property they could steal, and replace them with only the IP they had legal permission to use after getting the consent of the copyright owner - that, and older work now in the public domain - people would immediately see that the supposed value of GenAI was almost entirely based on what may be the greatest (non-land) theft ever.

[Kid Berwyn]

1. If they didn't pay for what they took that isn't theirs...

…then, that is theft. That includes taking humanity’s myths, legends, stories, cultural heritage and dreams and putting them into a computer brain.

[LisaM]

2. Trying to get people to understand or care is a problem.

I work in IP. The copyright issue is fascinating. The standoff is between tech people who accuse the Copyright Office of not understanding technology and the Copyright Office (rightly) retorting that the tech people don't understand the law.

Or in some cases they do understand and flout it anyway.

[highplainsdem]

8. The tech companies do understand copyright, and they are flouting it when they steal IP, but they want

their own copyrights respected.

And with GenAI they're claiming AI "democratizes" writing, art and music. And on Twitter, GenAI users and GenAI industry shills are busy attacking real writers and artists and musicians, calling them gatekeepers and elitists and monopolists and worse, just for objecting to their work being stolen so someone using GenAI who has no skill or talent can give a brief prompt to an AI model so algorithms can mindlessly loot all that stolen work to churn out fake writing and art and music in seconds. I saw one AI artist compare real artists who won't use AI to 19th century doctors who didn't believe in germ theory and wouldn't wash their hands, and she even told real artists, "Submit or be subsumed." (She got that phrase wrong - it's "and be" not "or be" - but since she got everything else wrong as well...)

[intrepidity]

3. Horse, barn door

I don't see how this ever gets corrected. One probable reason for this land-grab wss because they all knew there was a one-time opportunity, and they all rushed in, grabbing whatever they could however they could. Because they knew that, going forward, the available input (training data) would itself be contaminated by AI. I can understand the logic.

[highplainsdem]

4. They weren't aware at the time of the theft that model collapse could happen as more and more

GenAI crap contaminated the internet and was scraped for AI. They simply wanted to steal the most valuable intellectual property they could steal. If that's logic rather than sheer greed and arrogance, it's robbers' logic.

And if the "Horse, barn door" argument was a valid one for not at least attempting to correct injustices, we'd still have slavery.

[intrepidity]

9. Lol really?

You think they didn't anticipate this? Surely "model collapse" was something they thought about. What they probably expected was the eventual walling-off of data.

I stand by the barn door argument. Comparing this to, eg, slavery, is not rational.

[highplainsdem]

11. I haven't seen any AI company even acknowledge that model collapse is possible. As for the barn door

argument, it isn't one progressives should make when harm is being done or injustices need to be corrected. It's the argument people benefiting from those harms, or not caring enough to do anything about them, will make.

[usonian]

5. Solve this the old-fashioned way?

Sue the crap out of pillagers?

To this date, that's the only way that the worst traitor and destroyer of the United States has been held accountable: via civil suit.

I read that Apple is paying for the material it uses for AI training. Others?

You may have read in some of my posts that I'm ready to reinvent the internet ... not because I'm delusional, but because it has turned into such a shitpile that it HAS to be reinvented, and I quote respected thinkers who agree (so they're 10 or 15 years late ... oh well).

Will writing become an author-to-reader bespoke transaction?
That actually fits in with some of my other ideas.
10 or 15 years old.

and no, it's not password-locking PDF files.

[LudwigPastorius]

7. The "I want shit for free" genie is already out of the bottle.

We shouldn't be surprised. Giant corporations are just following the lead of society when it decided that the benefits of free content on the internet trumped the rights of IP creators to be compensated.

Hey, don't worry. Authors, just like musicians, can make their money touring and selling T-shirts!

[highplainsdem]

12. Giant corporations have shown a tendency to steal what they can since long before there was an internet.

[intrepidity]

10. Here's my "pie-in-the-sky" solution

Since the whole of humanity contributed to the knowledgebase that enabled the creation of AI, then that creation should be made to enrich the whole of humanity. Sure, the specific companies and people involved in the actual implementation can take a bit of a bonus, but the main of the profits need to belong to "the commons" and used to, eg, provide a universal basic income to *everyone* . That's the only just outcome of the AI revolution.

[highplainsdem]

13. I'd give that about zero chance of happening. AI is much more likely to greatly increase inequality and corporate

power over governments.