It’s quite one thing to use publicly published material for personal purposes. It’s quite another to use it to make money:
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Wednesday over the tech companies’ use of its copyright articles to train their artificial intelligence technology, joining a growing wave of opposition to the tech industry’s using creative work without paying for it or getting permission. [WaPo]
And that material is critical to OpenAI’s product. The defense?
The tech companies have steadfastly said that the use of information scraped from the internet to train their AI algorithms falls under “fair use” — a concept in copyright law that allows people to use the work of others if it is substantially changed. The Times’s lawsuit, however, includes multiple examples of OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI model outputting New York Times articles word for word.
And are they adding anything? I don’t see anything, yet. Next word prediction isn’t a creative use, just a statistical fact – a party trick, in a way.
And isn’t this an example of parasite and host?
But the use of this technology also presents a possible existential crisis for the news industry, which has struggled to find ways to replace the revenue it once generated from its profitable print products. The number of journalists working in newsrooms declined by more than 25 percent between 2008 and 2020, according to the Pew Research Center.
AI isn’t going to go out and gather news. It may word predict its way to something that looks like news, but there’s nothing trustworthy in that news. That trustworthiness, contingent as it may be, is also essential to the news process, both gathering and distributing it. There is none, so far, developed by and for AI, but we need to be aware of this part of “news” in order to think properly about this mess.
