Congress Wants Tech Companies to Pay Up for AI Training Data

So we’ll get a couple of big players who managed to gobble and hoard everything before any regulation was in place and nobody else. Oh the sweet smell of monopoly
- Yep. Effectively outlawing AI with this licensing hogwash (which no human who is learning how to write or draw from the same content must pay), will only drive it into the bowels of the rich and powerful. Then you will have your AI dystopia.
  
  The choices here are to respect copyright or destroy it. Having and AI exception is nonsense.
  "I'm not illegally downloading the latest blockbuster/ best seller / chart topping album. I'm scraping the internet for training data for my AI. It just so happens I need to filter the data by hand before it can injest it. I keep looking for suitable data, but haven't identified any yet. "
  There's plenty of non copyright material out there to do research on. It won't make for useful AI products, but they can start licensing for that.

“What would that even look like?” asks Sarah Kreps, who directs the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. “Requiring licensing data will be impractical, favor the big firms like OpenAI and Microsoft that have the resources to pay for these licenses, and create enormous costs for startup AI firms that could diversify the marketplace and guard against hegemonic domination and potential antitrust behavior of the big firms.”
As our economy becomes more and more driven by AI, legislation like this will guarantee Microsoft and Google get to own it.
- Yes, and they'll use legislation to pull up the ladder behind them. It's a form of Regulatory Capture, and it will absolutely lock out small players.
  But there are open source AI training datasets, but the question is whether LLMs can be trained as accurately with them.
  
  Any foundation model is trained on a subset of common crawl.
  All the data in there is, arguably, copyrighted by one individual or another. There is no equivalent open - or closed - source dataset to it.
  Each single post, page, blog, site, has a copyright holder. In the last year big companies have started to change their TOS to make that they are able to use, relicense and generally sell your data hosted in their services as their own for the intent of AI training, so potentially some small parts of common crawl will be licensable in bulk - or directly obtained from the source.
  This does still leave out the majority of the data directly or indirectly used today, even if you were willing to pay, because it is unfeasable to search and contract every single rights holder.
  On the other side of it there have been work to use less but more heavily curated data, which could potentially generate good small, domain specific, models. But still they will not be like the ones we currently have, and the open source community will not be able to have access to the same amount and quality of data.
  It's an interesting problem that I'm personally really interested to see where it leads.
  
  These open datasets are used to fine-tune LLMs for specific tasks. But first, LLMS have to learn the basics by being trained on vast amounts of text. At present, there is no chance to do that with open source.
  If fair use is cut down, you can forget about it. It would arguably be unconstitutional, though.
  That's not even considering the dystopian wishes to expand copyright even further. Some people demand that the model owner should also own the output. Well, some of these open datasets are made with LLMs like ChatGPT.
- Well fuck all those artists and writers who made the original works then I guess. Licensing is impractical.
  
  They're going to get fucked either way, may as well live in the world where smaller AI companies have a chance. It's already bad enough that openai got to slurp reddit and twitter for free and nobody else can.
- And what about the authors whose works were injected without compensation? What should we do for them? I don't think that these commercial AI models should get to infringe on their copyrights for nothing. If I pay for a ChatGPT subscription and ask it to tell me about the war the Middle East and it basically regurgitates and plagiarizes information it learned from a journalist, then ChatGPT has essentially stolen the copyrighted work from that journalist and the revenue that my click would have earned them.
  I don't see a problem using publicly posted copyrighted data for non-commercial use for training local language models but don't think its fair to allow copyright infringement for commercial use.
  
  You're repeating some talking points which are simply misinformation. An author who makes something "for hire", like an employed journalist, does not own the copyright. Do you believe that construction workers benefit when rents go up?
  Copyrights are called intellectual property, because they work a lot like physical property. Employees create them and employers own them. They are bought and sold. A disproportionate share of property belongs to rich people, which is how they are rich.
  This is about funneling more wealth to property owners. The idea that this would benefit anyone else is simply the good old trickle-down. It will not happen.
  
  I think it's better be pragmatic then to give everything to the big corporations.
  OpenAi isn't going to takes its tool offline so the loss of revenue isn't going away. Payments won't end up in the pockets of any individual journalist. The money the few journalistic sites will receive will be used to pay for the subscription fee to the next big model while cutting off their staff since it will net them more money.
  If this goes through, Google and Microsoft will spend the next few years buying data or the companies that have it. The walls will be raised and we will be fucked, legislation will only help them.
  And there is simply not enough public domain data to build a competitive product. Better to tax and redistribute through UBI while keeping the field competitive and avoiding monopolies imo.

I think it would be better to enforce open, readable training sets that anyone can browse through to submit legal requests

The irony this is coming back to being a copyright extension issue in the year of our lord and savior, Steamboat Willie, is not lost on me.

Regulating data collection on publications: congressional action is a go!
Regulating data collection on consumers: everybody look the other way!

Are they going to pay for anything that ever inspired them? Every time you publish an article, you owe a dollar to every English teacher you ever had? Fill out your taxes and you owe your math teachers?
It's fucking goofy...
- That's a pretty dumb comparison. Are you suggesting that people who create stuff used to train AI are obligated to provide that education for free? People who create books/educational aids for teachers to use in classrooms still demand to be paid for that. Teachers are paid for delivering that education. The kids don't pay the teachers, as a society we tax people because education benefits us all, but the teachers are still paid (not enough!)
  
  I think he's suggesting that it's pretty dystopian to let creators decide that their content is free to view but only if you're a human willing to let companies spy on you while watching it.
  It's either free or it's not.
  
  Human brain (any brain, really) is a natural neural network which is trained throughout its life the same way an artificial neural network is. Nothing is original, every creator is "stealing" from every other creator who's work they have studied to become better creators. No creator ever in history has created anything in pure, absolute vaccuum. Every creation is a remix and amalgamation of previously created works.
  And intellectual property is a spook , anyway. No-one can own an idea.
- You’re getting downvoted, but it will be the next thing. Don’t you dare thank the people or books that inspired you when you give that Peabody acceptance speech.

Don't hate me... Did Hawley just grow up in the wrong place?
He always ends up in the reasonable end of some of this shit, except he has to do it under the guise of his firebrand bigoted bullshit.
Someone tell me what opinions I'm supposed to form about this guy
- I think most of the crazy lawmakers are not actually crazy. You probably need to be quite intelligent to make it through all the hoops to get elected to congress. It's an act that they know gets them attention on social media, but on issues that aren't partisan they can actually act like adults
  
  Unfortunately the GOP has decreed since at least the 90s that everything is partisan.
- Hawley happens to be reasonable on some issues that have bipartisan support. He's a true asshat on social issues.

Would finally make the snakes that gather the training data accountable, since AI companies use them as scapegoats.