In his LinkedIn post, Bill Gross raises important concerns about how AI systems are trained on copyrighted works without proper compensation to creators. He created ProRata.ai, to fairly credit and compensates content owners for their work used by generative AI platforms.?
AI stole billions of books and articles.?It’s CopyWrong! The word “copyright” signals to?us that someone has rightful ownership of a work. Through creativity and effort and thoughtfulness and probably sacrifice, too, the copyright owner gave the world something valuable, some special intellectual property; in return for this gift, the creator has earned the right to say “this is mine.” And the right to be properly compensated for their work. ? Not anymore. Not if OpenAI and Google have their way. This past week Emma Roth wrote an article in The Verge about training AI on content they don’t own. The biggest players in AI apparently don’t believe the word copyright has meaning anymore--except of course when it comes to their own intellectual property. Or, more accurately, “copyright” now means two things: ? 1.???Content of significant enough value that they want unfettered access to have their LLMs train on it ? 2.???A “burdensome requirement” (OpenAI’s words) that threatens to lose the U.S. the race for AI supremacy to China ? The AI leaders have framed their ask as a matter of urgent national security. Should existing copyright laws be allowed to stand, they warn us in scary tones, then prepare for the coming dystopia. ? Their plea to the Trump Administration – to open the floodgates and free AI companies from the petty, difficult, expensive work of compensating those who created copyrighted material that they want to have “teach” their machines – is almost breathtaking in its subtly resentful tone. They’re saying: If all those writers, publishers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, newspapers, websites, etc., etc., would just move over and stop “hindering private sector innovation” and let us consume everything they created, freedom and the American Way will be restored. ? The hypocrisy. What is copyrightable material, after all, but private sector innovation? ? This is not inevitable.?There are viable commercial options that protect copyright and compensate content creators fairly. ? Check us out at ProRata Ai to learn more and to support what WE call fair use.