7:59-9:50 Justine Bateman:
“I mean first I want to give people, help people have a little bit of a definition of what generative AI is—
think of it as like a blender and if you have a blender at home and you turn it on, what does it do? It depends on what I put into it, so it cannot function unless it’s fed things.

Then you turn on the blender and you give it a prompt, which is your little spoon, and you get a little spoonful—little Frankenstein spoonful—out of what you asked for.
So what is going into the blender? Every but a hundred years of film and television or many, many years of, you know, doctor’s reports or students’ essays or whatever it is.

In the film business, in particular, that’s what we call theft; it’s the biggest violation. And the term that continues to be used is “all we did.” I think the CTO of OpenAI—believe that’s her position; I forget her name—when she was asked in an interview recently what she had to say about the fact that they didn’t ask permission to take it in, she said, “Well, it was all publicly available.”

And I will say this: if you own a car—I know we’re in New York City, so it’s not going to be as applicable—but if I see a car in the street, it’s publicly available, but somehow it’s illegal for me to take it. That’s what we have the copyright office for, and I don’t know how well staffed they are to handle something like this, but this is the biggest copyright violation in the history of that office and the US government”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/why-the-new-york-times-might-win-its-copyright-lawsuit-against-openai

Daniel Jeffries wrote:

“Trying to get everyone to license training data is not going to work because that’s not what copyright is about,” Jeffries wrote. “Copyright law is about preventing people from producing exact copies or near exact copies of content and posting it for commercial gain. Period. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying or simply does not understand how copyright works.”

The AI community is full of people who understand how models work and what they’re capable of, and who are working to improve their systems so that the outputs aren’t full of regurgitated inputs. Google won the Google Books case because it could explain both of these persuasively to judges. But the history of technology law is littered with the remains of companies that were less successful in getting judges to see things their way.