New York Times considers legal action against OpenAI as copyright tensions swirl
Honestly, I think generative AI losing a massive copyright showdown is inevitable at this stage.<p>It&#x27;s extremely easy to get the latest generation of AIs to produce outputs that in many fields sans-AI would be trivially considered as IP infringement.<p>While there are many interesting reasonable legal &amp; technical arguments that it&#x27;s not, the result completely undermines copyright protections regardless. If that&#x27;s accepted at scale, copyright in practice will change completely. In effect, the choices are &quot;block this, or entirely destroy copyright protections in many industries&quot;. You can&#x27;t allow this without eventually allowing everybody to simulate their own NY Times reporters, produce their own Marvel movies, and create their own Taylor Swift albums.<p>If you do allow that, the many many affected industries have catastrophic problems.<p>Problematic though copyright laws are, I see no world where all those protections go away any time soon, and so if the courts don&#x27;t agree to protect copyright already in this scenario, then it will eventually be legislated to make that happen. AI consuming copyrighted data and producing an output has to be considered a derivative work (or indeed, the model itself will be considered a derivative work) or IP protections are effectively broken.<p>There&#x27;s a grace period now while we work our way there, but the politics is pretty clear and with no plausible path to &quot;let&#x27;s drop copyright completely&quot; ASAP, I just don&#x27;t see any other result in the medium term. Doesn&#x27;t mean the end of generative AI by any means, just a slowdown as we move to a world where you need to negotiate rights and buy data to feed it first, instead of scraping everybody else&#x27;s for free.