<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/05/20/copyright-licensing-for-ai-training-wont-make-anything-fair/>
"A few weeks ago, the UK’s regional and national daily news titles ran similar
front covers, exhorting the government there to “Make it Fair.” The campaign
Web site explained:
Tech companies use creative content, such as news articles, books, music,
film, photography, visual art, and all kinds of creative work, to train
their generative AI models.
Publishers and creators say that doing this without proper controls,
transparency or fair payment is unfair and threatens their livelihoods.
Under new UK proposals, creators will be able to opt out of their works being
used for training purposes, but the current campaign wants more than that:
Creators argue this [opt-out] puts the burden on them to police their work
and that tech companies should pay for using their content.
The campaign Web site then uses a familiar trope:
Tech giants should not profit from stolen content, or use it for free.
But the material is not stolen, it is simply analyzed as part of the AI
training. Analyzing texts or images is about knowledge acquisition, not
copyright infringement. Once again, the copyright industries are trying to
place a (further) tax on knowledge. Moreover, levying that tax is completely
impractical. Since there is no way to determine which works were used during
training to produce any given output, the payments would have to be according
to their contribution to the training material that went into creating the
generative AI system itself. A
Walled Culture post back in October 2023 noted
that the amounts would be extremely small, because of the sheer quantity of
training data that is used. Any monies collected from AI companies would
therefore have to be handed over in aggregate, either to yet another
inefficient collection society, or to the corporate intermediaries. For this
reason, there is no chance that creators would benefit significantly from any
AI tax."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
