I’m sorry, but it’s not my responsibility to educate you about copyright law, even though I have done what I could. I wish you the best. Good day.

When i write a sentence then do i have a copyright upon it which i can defend in law?

Umm… Yes. Yes, you do. That’s how copyright works…

The current models are all trained with data which at least some larger creator (book writer or whatever) does not want a model to be trained on.

Is this not antithetical to your stance? Or are you saying that only those entities large enough to defend themselves against the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic are deserving of being paid for use of their works?

The current models are under the current law unsustainable.

I completely agree with you here, but something like a class action lawsuit is not a viable solution.

You understand the scale right? This is a combinatorial problem: the plaintiffs in this case would be every individual and company that has ever existed, and the defendants would be not only the AI companies, but also anyone who has ever used or published AI generated content. That’s a wishful thought, not a realistic solution.

Holy shit! What an excellent idea.

I always advocate for putting AI models under UNESCO stewardship

As now will I.

Copyright isn’t something you “get.” It’s something that comes with the production, no extra steps required.

You’ve accidentally come upon the other reason why your example doesn’t hold in the training data case. How do you suss out who actually holds the copyright on that data.

Take my shitpost for example. Whonis the copyright holder? Me the author? Reddit the platform I published on? What if the source was an Internet Archive snapshot?

Do you earnestly believe this could work in practice?

And we are talking about meaningful data not your shitpost, like licensed code or a book you wrote and anthropic pirated.

Ah ha! You see, that’s the problem. My shitpost is meaningful data. This is something people seem to have a really hard time understanding. Scaling laws and the size of the search space in AI training means that the datum is not valuable. It’s only the data (in conglomerate) that is value for training, and my shitpost would be a part of that.

Once you understand this, you should see what I meant when I said it’s not feasible. How do you determine and then fairly distribute the payout to everyone who has ever written or recorded anything in digital format? This is not a simple supply vs demand equation, like your bakery example assumes.

Also I have no idea what Netflix has to do with this discussion.

How do you suggest an individual should go about this?

Do I go down to my local courthouse and file a suit against Anthropic so I can ask the judge to subpoena them to determine if my Reddit shitpost from 2012 is in their training set?

I don’t think it’s really possible to do this.

I mean speaking just logistically, how would you determine who gets how much? If it’s based on quality, how do you determine what is of high quality? Otherwise, does everyone who has every written anything that finds its way into a training dataset get like a tenth of a cent?

Alternative proposal: all AI models must be released as open weights, available to everyone.

AI, through its use of training data, has benefited from the sum total of human knowledge, therefore the results of this training should be given back for the use of all humanity.

That seems fair to me.

What! You mean the bioaccumulating micro particles are not totally harmless? I’m shocked! Shocked I tell you.

What’s next? Are you gonna tell me water is wet, or fire is hot?

Don’t get me wrong, having the empirical validation (along with a mechanism) is nice, but this should cone as a shock to absolutely nobody.