US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

1. Criticizes a highly useful technology 2. Matches a potentially-outdated, strict interpretation of copyright law

My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against. When I look at the litany of derivative fantasy novels, it's obvious they're not all fully independent works.

Since AI is and will continue to be so useful and transformative, I think we just need to acknowledge that our laws did not accomodate this use-case, then we should change them.

Copyright only comes into play on publication. It's only concerned about publication of the models and publication of works. The machine itself doesn't have agency to publish anything at this point.

"Humans are allowed to breathe, so our machine is too, because it is operated by humans!"

Point being, laws aren't some God-ordained rules, beautiful in their fractal recursive abstraction, perfectly covering everything that will ever happen in the universe. No, laws are more or less crude hacks that deal with here and now. Intellectual property rights were questionable from the start and only got worse; they've been barely keeping up with digital media in the past couple decades, and they're entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI. This is a new situation, and laws need to be updated to cover it.

Except in this case, we already have the equivalent of "laws about oxygen consumption": copyright.

> Intellectual property rights were questionable from the start and only got worse; they've been barely keeping up with digital media in the past couple decades, and they're entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI.

The laws are not "entirely ill-equipped to deal with generative AI," unless your interests lie in breaking them. All the hand-waving about the laws being "questionable" and "entirely ill-equipped" is just noise.

Under current law OpenAI, Google, etc. have no right to cheap training data, because someone made that data and may have the reasonable interest in getting paid for their efforts. Like all businesses, those companies would ideally like the law to be unfairly biased towards them: to protect them when they charge as much as they can, but not protect anyone else so they can pay as little as possible.

Copyright laws were themselves created by the printing press making it easy to duplicate works, whereas previously if you half-remembered something that was just "inspiration".

But that only gave the impression of helping creative people: today, any new creative person has to compete with the entire reproducible cannon of all of humanity before them — can you write fantasy so well that new readers pick you up over Pratchett or Tolkien?

Now we have AI which are "inspired" (perhaps) by what they read, and half-remember it, in a way that seems similar to pre-printing-press humans sharing stories even if the mechanism is different.

How this is seen according to current law likely varies by jurisdiction; but the law as it is today matters less than what the law will be when the new ones are drafted to account for GenAI.

What that will look like, I am unsure. Could be that for training purposes, copyright becomes eternal… but it's also possible that copyright may cease to exist entirely — laws to protect the entire creative industry may seem good, but if AI displaces all humans from economic activity, will it continue to matter?