I think bsky is right that the AI rollout differed from other tech. Yes, it was unusually fast. And yes, it was unusually controversial. Is that odd? Well, this is the first time we’ve distributed a symbol-system capable of conversation & zero-shot learning. It’s not inline skates, y’all. +
So, no, it does not surprise me that adoption was fast, or that many people feel troubled by this. We have have correctly perceived that these systems replicate a wide range of human behavior, making the social stakes an order of magnitude higher than for other technologies.
@tedunderwood.com and yet, we are talking of black box systems that have numerous issues, copyright infringements and illicit content being only two of the clear-cut and legally unambiguous ones.
The technology is one thing, the market is a different one. Legislation (already in the US and continuously more so in the EU) is deliberately closing its eyes of this distinction in the interest of multibillionaires. If not corruption, this is inequality politics at best.
Edit: see discussion below for an admission that "legally unambiguous" is an unnecessary exaggeration.
copyright infringement *is* ambiguous here. some rulings find infringement, others do not.
@axeghostgame.bsky.social @tedunderwood.com those that don't find it are by judges that haven't brothered to ask for the training data. Those that find it, are able to confirm it even without requiring the data. It's the misguided idea of accountability of the "don't ask for permission, but for forgiveness later" mantra.
This is not the case in the US. Our laws around fair use are flexible and require interpretation. You can argue for an interpretation of this case, but you really cannot say it's unambiguous. That claim is instantly refuted by the empirical range of legal opinion.
@tedunderwood.com @axeghostgame.bsky.social fair enough, my "legally unambiguous" is an inappropriate exaggeration. In a system of settlement agreements (Disney, News Corp, Springer and counting in the case of OpenAI), it is easy to get confused about the specific unresolved issues.
So according to this one review article:
1. A tendency might start to emerge to consider commercial AI systems (the technology) fall within fair use
2. But the (business) practice of accessing the original materials is not rarely through acts of piracy. This includes allegations of seeding pirate torrents to enable the anonymous acquisition of pirated content.
https://copyrightalliance.org/ai-copyright-lawsuit-developments-2025/
Yes, although the training may be fair use, Anthropic e.g. is paying a settlement for the piracy they practiced at an early stage. Note however that they switched strategy: they now buy up used books and digitize them for internal use, which is legal. +
It’s a complicated picture, and my moral judgments about it are also frankly colored by strong disapproval of existing IP laws, which make academic research on the past century of cultural production extraordinarily difficult. Century-long copyright terms are imo an abomination.
If what we care about ultimately is equality — as suggested by your first post here — I would propose that our priority ought to be ensuring that no company can “corner the market” on learning. IP creators can forbid copying texts, but the things we learn from them are a collective inheritance.
nah. this summary reflects what what I saw when I first looked into it.