For years, tech giants have argued that if information is available on the internet, it can be used for AI model development and outputs. They call it fair use. Content owners have tried to prevent this, with no success.
Now Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are discovering what the rest of the internet has already learned through painful experience: once you put something online, people will find ways to use it in ways you don’t like and can’t stop.
The latest flashpoint is something called “distillation,” using the outputs of one AI model to improve another. Anthropic says competitors are harvesting its outputs at scale, turning billions of dollars of research into a shortcut for rivals. OpenAI and Google have made similar warnings recently.
This is how we know AI should be a collectivist project, one that isn’t owned by large corporations but is funded by taxes and developed in academies, and all IP derived from it falls into the public domain.
Besides which a lot of artists mind a lot less when their material is borrowed by a non-profit, or to serve a public works project. (There are exceptions. Disney is notoriously litigious about murals in nurseries.)
PS: Development of a robust public domain is the only reason that intellectual property should exist at all. Also it’s not property so much as a licensed temporary monopoly.
PSS: History has already shown us that people will invent stuff and do fabulous art simply by being allowed to live in a state other than desperation. Public welfare programs beget art booms. The most recent example of this was during the COVID-19 lockdown which came with extended unemployment and stimulus checks, resulting in the Great Resignation in which a lot of people turned their hobbies into something lucrative.
Yeah it has to be open weight and free to use for everybody, with regulation to tag all AI output as generated so we know what is what.
The worst outcome would be if somehow all open weight AI models that can’t show their training data will be subject to some kind of tax or rent by AI / IP collection agencies, ultimately going to the plutocrats. That would be techno feudalism. Big corporations can afford to negotiate and pay license fees and often profit from cumbersome regulation too that prevents others from producing value. So the worst outcome is if we have robots doing all the work, and all the robot IP is owned by the techno-feudalists. And we can’t even use robots to help with subsistence farming because we can’t pay the expensive AI IP licenses.