A New York Times copyright lawsuit could kill OpenAI::A list of authors and entertainers are also suing the tech company for damages that could total in the billions.
A New York Times copyright lawsuit could kill OpenAI::A list of authors and entertainers are also suing the tech company for damages that could total in the billions.
I think that the error in your reasoning is that OpenAI’s tools are themselves greatly accelerating the expansion of the wealth gap. They have been greedily wreckless though and pissed off other wealthy groups. The NYT dosn’t care about the rest of us but a victory from them might help establish precedents that help.
To put it another way, both orgs are terrible but, by negative impact on humanity, OpenAI is, measurably, magnitudes worse in multiple ways (harming workers, driving up demand for compute thus accelerating fossil fuel demand and global warming).
Would you be able to clarify your reasoning for thinking that OpenAI is less harmful?
It’s not about who is less harmful. It is about what the effects of the precedent would be.
The precedent would be that the NYT can charge money for AI training. OpenAI is not likely to disappear if it loses, but even if it did, the NYT would just find some other buyer. A win for the NYT would establish that they can charge money for AI training on their archive. That’s pure profit for the owners of the NYT. There is no reason why they should pay the authors again (or the printers, assistants, janitors, and anyone else involved in the making of the articles).
Whatever harm you see coming from OpenAI is not going away if the NYT wins. All a NYT win would mean, is that owners of intellectual property get money without having to do work.
I don’t think that we are entirely on the same page for the impact of the precedent. If the ruling is not comically constrained, it would layout the path forward for other creators and IP owners. The vast majority of which are individuals which are those most harmed.
Honestly, the best possible (though unlikely in the current political climate) outcome would be an overhaul of IP laws to make them in any way sane and legally codify mechanisms to protect workers from career loss due to automation such as taxes on AI and automation tools that replace humans in order to fund re-skilling programs as well as, ideally, publicly-funded organizations to pay cultural workers and remove the possibility of the extinction of the working artist, like is done with Ireland’s Art Council progams (I say this as one who works primarily in automation). Without such outcomes or a narrow ruling, yeah, it would effectively be just lead to NYT getting more money.
ETA: While we don’t currently seem to be on the same page, I do want to say thank you for the civil conversation and good points, and my apologies for my ADHD habit of getting a bit verbose.