Jacob Ward's Warning | Will A.I. Be The Death of Human Creativity
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Why are OpenAI and Google asking the government to allow training on copyrighted material?
Open AI and Google are asking the Trump administration to basically allow them to train their AI on whatever the hell they want, regardless of whether the stuff that they want to feed into it is protected by privacy laws or patents or copyright. The Trump administration has basically asked industry to come up with suggestions as to how they should get AI really going in this country. And this was OpenAI and Google's suggestion. And how are they defending this vacuuming up of all human creativity, regardless of whether or not they have any right to it? Well, the time-honored excuse that somehow if they don't do this, then China will get ahead in whatever this AI race is that everybody seems so concerned about.
So I want to break all that down, but I also want to take you through a little bit of history when it comes to a moment when I think we really had the chance to get it right and really might have taken a different turn, you know, caught the right train, basically. And avoided winding up in the position we're in right now where more or less all human creativity, art and music and writing and film and all of it is really poised to just be poured into AI and turned into a kind of disposable entertainment that won't pay, I think, anyone ever again really to be the kind of thoughtful, creative humans that we are so good at being. So, okay, let me walk you through this legal history a little bit. Try and stick with me because I think it really can sort of teach us something about it.
So between 2005 and 2015, America's writers and publishers battled Google in court. What had happened was Google had created something called Google Print that went on to become Google Books. This was in 2003. And Google basically grabbed up millions of books that they did not have the right to and just put them online as a searchable set of documents. And, you know, as you would imagine, authors who suddenly were faced with a world in which the work that they had done and had under copyright was suddenly free for anybody to read without ever having to pay anybody, right? They did not like that, and so they sued.
What did the Trump administration request from the tech industry about accelerating AI?
And for a brief moment, after years of back and forth in court, Everybody, the plaintiffs and Google, were sort of tiptoeing right on the edge of a settlement, and a settlement that might have made a big difference. You know, under its terms, Google would have basically paid authors for the right to make their work available online, and authors and publishers would have the right to say, no thank you, to opt out if they wanted to. But this would have been an extremely broad agreement. Not only would it have, you know, future-proofed Google Books, it also would have applied not just to the plaintiffs and not just to American authors and publishers, but basically to all books worldwide. The ultimate in legal protection for this project.
So there was a lot of back and forth about this and European governments weighed in. They said, wait a minute, we don't like this. This covers our authors and we're not even parties to this lawsuit. And other groups, other American groups stepped in as well. And eventually on March 22nd, 2011, Judge Denny Chin, federal judge, rejected the settlement. And the reasons he gave, I think, are really, really powerful and important. He said, here's a little quote from it. While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library, that's what Google Books said it was about, would benefit many, the settlement would simply go too far. He said it would reward Google for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission while, and this is the important part, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.
So if you think about 2011, that's the year, you know, a lot of stories in the news. That's the shooting, you know, where Gabby Gifford was injured. There's, you know, a ton of events. But when you look specifically at what my beat was that year, and you think about the moment we were in, that was the year that, you know, Facebook,
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
Why are OpenAI and Google asking the government to allow training on copyrighted material?
0:00–2:13
2
What did the Trump administration request from the tech industry about accelerating AI?
2:13–9:24
3
How did Google Books spark the landmark legal battle over digitizing books (2005–2015)?
9:24–13:50
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Don Lemon Show
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