Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.
Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.
I’m no lawyer, I don’t even play one on TV, so upfront apologies if I’m hanging my ass out.
That said, it sounds to me like Doctorow might have a point here. Suppose Universal et al. gets a precedent-setting ruling and slays OpenAI. LOL, LMAO even, but then what? What’s to keep the current entertainment cartels from making deals with Microsoft or the husks of the AI companies to rev up their own (now) fully legal and licensed bullshit engines? The only winning legal play is Giant Asteroid.
He says some pretty ignorant stuff in this post that undercuts his argument, though:
The writers’ and actors’ strikes, in an overwhelmingly unionized workforce, did not say “hey, we as a labor force want a cut of the dirty GPT lucre”. Instead, they said not today, satan to studios working with GenAI at all. And won. Those writers and actors, who are overwhelmingly huge supporters of copyright and moral rights, defeated the rich assholes at the Big Five not by throwing up their hands and giving all their creative output to the glurge machine, but by unionizing and painful, hard-won solidarity.
Whether SAG-AFTRA and the AFM (or non US equivalents) can organize as effectively for musicians and lyricists is unclear. But Cory, who claims to be a leftist, is defaulting to “you as a musician should work for free” and not “you as a musician should organize to counter the power of capital”, and that’s about as leftist as Grimes posing with The Communist Manifesto.
I read one of his books and I gotta tell ya, his idea of scifi was ‘what if the people negatively impacted by DRM were oppressed minorities instead of just first world complainers.’
I think it remains to be seen if you can train a base model without something as big as common crawl. A precedent that Universal needs to give you permission could also be a precedent that everyone must give you permission for you to scrape them.