The more we learn about how AI does business, the more unfair it looks.
Its companies must ingest other people’s work. You know, books, news stories, photographs, code, websites, that one original meme you came up with, and everything else on the internet to train its large language models. We also know that AI companies hate paying for any of it, obeying the licenses attached to it, or, God forbid, sharing their revenue with the companies and people who created the work in the first place.
Recently, Big AI's default way of doing business: "Take it now, argue about legality later," has become more in your face than ever. Look, for example, at the copyright fight between The New York Times and OpenAI and Microsoft. According to 404 Media ’s reporting on recently unsealed court documents - arguments from the plaintiffs that the court has not yet ruled on - Microsoft allegedly knew what it was doing when it was importing the internet willy-nilly.
Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Dr. Brent Hecht, was quoted in the news plaintiffs' 92-page combined brief as saying: the case was about “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”
Judge Sidney H. Stein of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York has not yet issued a decision on the case.
Big AI knows it needs the content.
Whether or not these statements are found to be reflective of a wider attitude, similar attitudes prevail amongst Big AI.
The court ruled that the plaintiffs hadn't established a claim under one particular provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which concerns the removal or change of copyright-management information.