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.”
I’m unconvinced that the fact they’re getting better at following instructions, like putting objects where the prompter specifies, or changing the colour, or putting the right number of them, etc means the model actually understands what the objects mean beyond their appearance. It doesn’t understand the cultural meanings attached to each object, and thus is unable to truly make a decision about why it should place an apple rather than an orange, or how the message within the picture changes when it’s a red sports car rather than a beige people-carrier.