caption
a screenshot of the text:
Tech companies argued in comments on the website that the way their models ingested creative content was innovative and legal. The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has several investments in A.I. start-ups, warned in its comments that any slowdown for A.I. companies in consuming content “would upset at least a decade’s worth of investment-backed expectations that were premised on the current understanding of the scope of copyright protection in this country.”
underneath the screenshot is the “Oh no! Anyway” meme, featuring two pictures of Jeremy Clarkson saying “Oh no!” and “Anyway”
screenshot (copied from this mastodon post) is of a paragraph of the NYT article “The Sleepy Copyright Office in the Middle of a High-Stakes Clash Over A.I.”
If this is what it takes to get copyright reform, just granting tech companies unlimited power to hoover up whatever they want and put it in their models, it’s not going to be the egalitarian sort of copyright reform that we need. Instead, we will just getting a carve out just for this, which is ridiculous.
There are small creators who do need at least some sort of copyright control, because ultimately people should be paid for the work they do. Artists who work on commission are the people in the direct firing line of generative AI, both in commissions and in their day jobs. This will harm them more than any particular company. I don’t think models will suffer if they can only include works in the public domain, if the public domain starts in 2003, but that’s not the kind of copyright protection that Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc. want, and that’s not what they’re going to ask for.