In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
To be honest I’m fine with it in isolation, copyright is bullshit and the internet is a quasi-socialist utopia where information (an infinitely-copyable resource which thus has infinite supply and 0 value under capitalist economics) is free and humanity can collaborate as a species. The problem becomes that companies like Google are parasites that take and don’t give back, or even make life actively worse for everyone else. The demand for compensation isn’t so much because people deserve compensation for IP per se, it’s an implicit understanding of the inherent unfairness of Google claiming ownership of other people’s information while hoarding it and the wealth it generates with no compensation for the people who actually made that wealth. “If you’re going to steal from us, at least pay us a fraction of the wealth like a normal capitalist”.
If they made the models open source then it’d at least be debatable, though still suss since there’s a huge push for companies to replace all cognitive labor with AI whether or not it’s even ready for that (which itself is only a problem insofar as people need to work to live, professionally created media is art insofar as humans make it for a purpose but corporations only care about it as media/content so AI fits the bill perfectly). Corporations are artificial metaintelligences with misaligned terminal goals so this is a match made in superhell. There’s a nonzero chance corporations might actually replace all human employees and even shareholders and just become their own version of skynet.
Really what I’m saying is we should eat the rich, burn down the googleplex, and take back the means of production.
I agree with you and all, but as someone who just got done degoogling their phone, Google does give back a whole lot.
Not using their services puts you back a decade technologically. My phone is a small PC again instead of a Star Trek Tricorder.
That’s fair, also congratulations. Idk if I would count that towards contributing to the internet though, since it’s all within their walled garden on their own terms. It’s helpful for people, but only insofar as it helps Google. 10 years ago I might be less critical since they were still in their “don’t be evil” phase and creating open source projects like Android left and right, something they’re evidently regretting now and trying to lock down using propriety core apps. It’s also worth noting Google’s AI employees authored “Attention is all you need”, the paper which laid the groundwork for modern Transformer-based LLMs, though that’s an architecture and not a full model or code.
Okay so I took back the means of production but it says it’s a subscription basis now
That’s late-stage capitalism for you – even revolution comes with a subscription fee
Probably shoulda read the Revolution TOS before clicking “I Agree”.
Or, if it was some non-profit doing the work for the good of everyone :')
If only there were some kind of open AI research lab lmao. In all seriousness Anthropic is pretty close to that, though it appears to be a public benefit corporation rather than a nonprofit. Luckily the open source community in general is really picking up the slack even without a centralized organization, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get something like the Linux Foundation eventually.