Apparently, stealing other people’s work to create product for money is now “fair use” as according to OpenAI because they are “innovating” (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.
OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit “misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence.”
My point, ultimately, is that the AI companies would have a stronger claim to fair use of artistic works if they could point to an end use-case that is good for humanity as a whole, to the point that it offsets the massive loss to and of artists. Because right now, the entirety of their claim to the complete contents of ArtStation appears to amount to nothing more than “trollface we want to make tons of money!” And that is not a good enough reason to render copyright law meaningless when it relates to individual artists but not corporations.