[hostyle]

> I do think OpenAI has a point in what they're saying: if we expect human-level competency of AI, it needs to be able to see and train on human-accessible content and ideally with a similar distribution.

Any human who wants to access copyrighted works is by law required to honour the copyright - whether that means purchasing of licenses, timed rental access or immediate cease and desist of usage. Why should AI (and the billion-dollar-backed companies building them) get different treatment?

Or to turn it the other way: if the billion-dollar-backed companies building AI models do get a free pass then surely humans should too?

[_zephyr]

I think there's an important distinction here though. We access copyrighted material all the time though, as accessing copyrighted material is not always protected in the ways you describe. We view copyrighted images via Google Images, for example. That works because Google stores metadata to point at the content and then loads it. Copyright is (broadly) more about the "not copying" it part.

[johnnyanmac]

>We access copyrighted material all the time though, as accessing copyrighted material is not always protected in the ways you describe.

sure, because there's an incentive to attract humans to view such content. It's advertising. Google images isn't built out of goodwill, but is now a target to optimize for to maximize human traffic to get human eyeballs to view ads (or paywalls) for humans consume more products. Having a bot come in ruins that, and the literal billions thrown at adtech to try to verify organic traffic shows that these bots are not desirable metrics for those who pay for ad space.

That perspective from a business lens shows the difference between a human viewing copyright material and a bot. Humans are monetization targets, bots are not. Humans can advertise for you to other humans, bots can't (well... not yet. But do we really want to be talking about ChatGPT ads this early in the LLM era?)