Everyone Knows The AI Business Model Is Steal First, Ask Permission...

"There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the internet was profound."

The head of Google parent company Alphabet, Sunder Pichai, has given a new interview to the BBC in which he says fears of the AI bubble bursting may well be justified. "I think no company is going to be immune, including us," said Pichai.

We'll return to the bubble, but the section of the interview that really jumped out at me related to current AI use and in a wider sense the business model. AI companies have until now relied on a fair use defense for their unprecedented use of copyrighted content to train their models, via the process known as "scraping."

The BBC's Faisal Islam asks Pichai about this model, mentioning the multiple court cases that have sprung up in different jurisdictions, and drives towards a literal million dollar question: will these tech companies at one point have to retroactively pay for this use of copyrighted material?

"First of all, to step back, it is so important as we go through this that we both help drive creativity and innovation, but we have to do that in a framework which respects creatives' rights," says Pichai. "As well as a love for transformative use to deliver benefits to society. I think we're committed to copyright frameworks in all the countries we operate in."

Pichai then delivers the current go-to defense for AI companies, which is that many of them (not all) have incorporated opt-outs into their models.

"Today when we train we give people an option to opt-out of the training," says Pichai. "And we honour copyright in terms of how our outputs are generated."

That last line strikes me as especially weaselly. The question here is not whether these models output copyrighted work (even though they often do!). It's about whether they should be using copyrighted work in the first place.

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Also: I can't figure out where this supposed opt-out is. I'm sure it does exist but, if you told me I could tell Google not to train its models on my YouTube videos by opting out, I wouldn't be able to tell you where the option to opt out is found. Anyway:

Source: PC Gamer