What to do about AI models being trained on millions of copyrighted works with no compensation for the original creator? Maybe apply the YouTube example?

I was reading this terrific article from Yahoo (Without Content, OpenAI’s Sora and Generative AI Tech Are Useless. So Shouldn’t Artists Get Paid?, by Peter Csathy and available here) which discussed the copyright dilemma that exists because generative AI tech “startups” OpenAI Anthropic, Cohere and Perplexity – all privately held companies valued (or soon to be valued) in excess of $1 billion – are “scraping the vast Internet, sucking up millions of copyrighted works in the process — all without consent”. They are the newest tech unicorns.

These companies are claiming fair use as a defense and, as the author noted “so far Silicon Valley is winning. Federal courts that have addressed the issue have essentially concluded there can be no actionable infringement when an artist’s copyrighted works are included in a training data set of millions. The rationale seems to be that generative AI’s end result – its output – will not be substantially similar to the allegedly infringed work and, therefore, cannot cause direct harm to its creator. It’s kind of an “only one small screw in a machine with thousands of parts” rationale that, upon first blush, sounds kind of logical. If that machine spits out plastic fasteners, they look nothing like the screw.”

Will that change? Who knows? But one aspect of the article I found particularly interesting – this has happened before…with the YouTube example.

As the author notes, “Originally, [YouTube’s] content was expected to be user-generated content, enabling anyone to broadcast themselves (‘broadcast yourself’ was its original tagline, in fact). That meant, of course, that users gave their consent when they uploaded their videos. But it was professionally produced content, much of which was copyrighted, that really broke things wide open.”

It also enabled YouTube to build a massive customer base in record time and enable the founders to sell YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion. Much of the value was built on top of – you guessed it – unlicensed copyrighted works.

However, after major infringement litigation, YouTube set up a Content ID system to identify copyrighted content and pay creators for any unlicensed use of their works.

As their page on Content ID states:

“Using a database of audio and visual files submitted by copyright owners, Content ID identifies matches of copyright-protected content. When a video is uploaded to YouTube, it’s automatically scanned by Content ID.

If Content ID finds a match, the matching video will get a Content ID claim. Depending on the copyright owner’s Content ID settings, a Content ID claim results in one of the following actions:

• Blocks a video from being viewed
• Monetizes the video by running ads against it and sometimes sharing revenue with the uploader
• Tracks the video’s viewership statistics”

Will the AI companies embrace a similar approach? Probably not – unless the tide begins turning on copyright infringement litigation against them. If it does, then maybe the YouTube example of identifying and paying creators for use of copyrighted content will be fair for everybody. Of course, tech unicorns tend to win these battles, so it may all be a moot point.

So, what do you think? Should content creators and artists be paid for use of their works by AI models? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using Bing Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot riding a unicorn”.

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