https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4905118

“There are many good reasons to be concerned about the rise of generative AI(…). Unfortunately, there are also many good reasons to be concerned about copyright’s growing prevalence in the policy discourse around AI’s regulation. Insisting that copyright protects an exclusive right to use materials for text and data mining practices (whether for informational analysis or machine learning to train generative AI models) is likely to do more harm than good. As many others have explained, imposing copyright constraints will certainly limit competition in the AI industry, creating cost-prohibitive barriers to quality data and ensuring that only the most powerful players have the means to build the best AI tools (provoking all of the usual monopoly concerns that accompany this kind of market reality but arguably on a greater scale than ever before). It will not, however, prevent the continued development and widespread use of generative AI.”

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“(…) As Michal Shur-Ofry has explained, the technical traits of generative AI already mean that its outputs will tend towards the dominant, likely reflecting ‘a relatively narrow, mainstream view, prioritizing the popular and conventional over diverse contents and narratives.’ Perhaps, then, if the political goal is to push for equality, participation, and representation in the AI age, critics’ demands should focus not on exclusivity but inclusivity. If we want to encourage the development of ethical and responsible AI, maybe we should be asking what kind of material and training data must be included in the inputs and outputs of AI to advance that goal. Certainly, relying on copyright and the market to dictate what is in and what is out is unlikely to advance a public interest or equality-oriented agenda.”

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“If copyright is not the solution, however, it might reasonably be asked: what is? The first step to answering that question—to producing a purposively sound prescription and evidence-based prognosis, is to correctly diagnose the problem. If, as I have argued, the problem is not that AI models are being trained on copyright works without their owners’ consent, then requiring copyright owners’ consent and/or compensation for the use of their work in AI-training datasets is not the appropriate solution. (…)If the only real copyright problem is that the outputs of generative AI may be substantially similar to specific human-authored and copyright-protected works, then copyright law as we know it already provides the solution.”