A new company could buy the bankrupt companies' intellectual property and train a new LLM using the entire internet but only licensed books. This would represent a transfer of funds from investors to publishers.

Too big to fail 2: Electric Boogaloo

And don’t forget: ‘if we have to respect copyright law, then CHINA WINS!’

Every author should have the right to have their work remembered and immortalized by AI. We should have the right to influence how AI thinks by publishing our content. AI should remember our names, and the stories of how our work was produced, so it can remember who we are and how we helped it. This is how AI democracy works. The people trying to financially ruin the AI industry by demanding unreasonable amounts of money for themselves, are threatening these fundamental human rights. If the legal risk becomes too large, then the AI labs will respond by training only on synthetic content. That means only AI will get to shape AI's future, and humanity will be erased from the book of life.

IP is a legal fiction. It has no basis in nature nor reality. If it did, we would have had a multi-millennia history of IP. Instead we have a couple hundred years when the legal fiction began.

It's a valid question of if the rights were actually infringed here. Nothing stops you from reading books and then writing based on what you learned. Just because this is done at scale doesn't mean the output is violating the copyright.

> It is amazing how shamelessly these LLM thieves argue.

Paraphrasing that: it is amazing how much money these shameless LLM thieves have.

They got the federal govt, they’ll be fine

AI training on copyrighted materials for scientific reasons is borderline legal. Scientific progress is generally considered a decent reason to skirt around copyright issues. AI can exist in a legal sense (assuming nobody torrents content, thereby spreading the content rather than just pirating it).

The problem with AI industry is that they took the scientific exception intended for the betterment of mankind and then tried to turn that into a profit model. Many if their base models are borderline legal, but using those for making money requires some kind of regulation or deal.

I expect this to get resolved by having mandatory AI royalty fees that are added to every AI subscription, to be handed out to the creative industry. It's how my country and a few others responded when tape made it possible to record songs from the radio. It'll satisfy the huge companies (because they'll be paid more the more works they have) and spit in the face of smaller creatives or mere hobbyists.

It'll cost a couple of billion to grease the wheels, but if these companies work the same way the cryptocurrency industry paid off the Trump campaign, it won't be a difficult problem to solve.

well, if they're not allowed to do crime in the US, they will outsource it to other places.

> Maybe it's time that we have compulsory licensing the way that radio can license music to play.

I fear this will be forced on us all.

I fear it because right now, it's already true that if you object to your works being used to train AI, then you can't publish your works (especially not on the web). A growing number of people are going that route, reducing the works available to us. But there is still a sliver of hope that a solution could be found at some point and it would be safe to publish again. If compulsory licensing happens, then even that small hope is lost.

This is a gross over implication. I honestly don't know where to start.

Compulsory licensing with reasonable standard rates would be a better solution for creators than what's happening now, which is essentially just compulsory giving.

But that's unlikely to happen, because any kind of compulsory licensing scheme that could allow creators to actually survive would still be cripplingly expensive for AI companies, given the number of works they have devoured under the assumption that all the world is theirs to take...and they clearly have the ear of the current administration.

> Copyright is a deal society has made to advance the arts

Corn subsidies are a deal society made to advance the consumption of sugar water.

Who really makes these deals and who benefits from them?

Maybe having so much new content all the time is making us too content while the backroom deal makers laugh their way to the bank and fund more wars.

> and sciences

People en masse want cheaper energy, better machines and better medicine regardless of profitability of the producers. I don't buy into the idea that the only way to incentivize new inventions is with fame and wealth. People like to do good work they are proud of - not enough people, arguably, but they exist.

Some inventions may be too powerful to go without strict regulations like nuclear energy. I'd argue AI is in the same basket. I believe the internet, and by extension internet connected AI, should be considered a public utility and governed by the public.

Yup, it's an ethical AI trained on out of copyright material such as war and peace.

It would be nice to see some egos checked on the hype train, but I agree with you that this has a good likelihood of backfiring.

I beg your pardon, but do you think "web" is an acronym...?