Fuck 'em. I don’t care. I hope no one uses them.

Yeah I noticed that too late.

You have to remember, AI training isn’t only for mega-corporations. By setting up barriers that only benefit the ultra-wealthy, you’re handing corporations a monopoly of a public technology by making it prohibitively expensive to for regular people to keep up. These companies already own huge datasets and have whatever money they need to buy more. And that’s before they bind users to predatory ToS allowing them exclusive access to user data, effectively selling our own data back to us. What some people want would mean the end of open access to competitive, corporate-independent tools and would leave us all worse off and with fewer rights than where we started.

The same people who abuse DMCA takedown requests for their chilling effects on fair use content now need your help to do the same thing to open source AI. Their next greatest foe after libraries, students, researchers, and the public domain. Don’t help them do it.

I recommend reading this article by Cory Doctorow, and this open letter by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries. I’d like to hear your thoughts.

He’s not trying to get copyright for something he generated, he’s trying to have the court award copyright to his AI system “DABUS”, but copyright is for humans. Humans using Gen AI are eligible for copyright according to the latest guidance by the United States Copyright Office.

One of the provisions of fair use is the effects on the market. If your spambot is really shitting up the place, you may very well run afoul of the doctrine.

We’re saying the same thing here. It’s just your characterization of gen AI as a “tech-enabled copying device” isn’t accurate. You should read this which breaks down how all this works.

The fair use doctrine allows you to do just that. The alternative would be someone being able to publish a book and then shutting anyone else out of publishing, discussing, or building on their ideas without them getting a kick-back.

The funny part is most of the headlines want you to believe that using things without permission is somehow against copyright. When in reality, fair use is a part of copyright law, and the reason our discourse isn’t wholly controlled by mega-corporations and the rich. It’s sad watching people desperately trying to become the kind of system they’re against.

I recommend reading this article by Cory Doctorow, and this one by Katherine Klosek, the director of information policy and federal relations at the Association of Research Libraries.

Reminder that this is made by Ben Zhao, the University of Chicago professor who stole open source code for his last data poisoning scheme.