More than a decade ago, the normalization of tech companies carrying content created by news organizations without directly paying them — cannibalizing readership and ad revenue — precipitated the decline of the media industry. With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, those same firms threaten to further tilt the balance of power between Big Tech and news.
On Wednesday, lawmakers in the Senate Judiciary Committee referenced their failure to adopt legislation that would’ve barred the exploitation of content by Big Tech in backing proposals that would require AI companies to strike licensing deals with news organizations.
Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and chair of the committee, joined several other senators in supporting calls for a licensing regime and to establish a framework clarifying that intellectual property laws don’t protect AI companies using copyrighted material to build their chatbots.
“We need to learn from the mistakes of our failure to oversee social media and adopt standards,” he said.
The fight over the legality of AI firms eating content from […]
“Information wants to be free” is the motto of the hypocritical technocrat, as they don’t have to support the cost of its production, while simultaneously claiming that “Information doesn’t want to be free”, as they jealously guard their proprietary software “rights”. Google and other large information companies have lived off the labor of others for decades now, and they have paid no price. It is the rest of us who pay the price, with software like Chat GPT being the greatest plagiarism scam of them all. It is all theft. But hasn’t that become the warp and woof of modern US society?