Big AI's content problem: Take the work, keep the money
The more we learn about how AI does business, the more unfair it looks
Big AI faces a significant content problem. To train its large language models (LLMs), the tech giant must ingest a vast amount of material from other sources, such as books, news stories, photographs, code, websites, and user-generated content. Despite this reliance, AI companies are reluctant to pay for the copyrighted material, ignoring the associated licenses or sharing revenue with the original creators.
Recently, the situation has escalated, with The New York Times embroiled in a legal battle against OpenAI and Microsoft. According to court documents, Microsoft allegedly recognized the magnitude of the issue, with a senior executive likening it to "the largest theft of labor in human history." Microsoft's internal policy documents even acknowledged that generative AI might "significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained." This, in turn, could lead to "model collapse."
The AI industry's focus on content creation is causing a "doom loop," where companies prioritize immediate financial gains while disregarding the long-term implications. Big AI companies are actively contesting the plaintiffs' claims in open use cases, arguing that their actions advance public knowledge and do not act as unlawful economic substitutes.
However, the evidence suggests that AI companies are engaging in a destructive pattern where they train their models on other people's work without proper compensation or adherence to copyright laws.
These practices could have severe consequences for various industries, including journalism, fiction writing, and graphic creation. The lack of proper compensation for content creators could eventually lead to a decline in the quality of work produced. Moreover, AI-generated code raises additional concerns, as copyright information may be omitted from training datasets, potentially leading to copyright infringement.
Despite the risks, AI companies continue to prioritize speed and profitability over ethical considerations and the well-being of content creators.
Written by urgent.news from The Register's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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- Big AI's content problem: Take the work, keep the money theregister.com
