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To write, run ad campaigns, and run side hustles, AI needs training material. ChatGPT needed about 300 billion words to launch and continues to train itself based on how users interact with it.
However, humans receive neither credit nor compensation for creating the content that gets gobbled up by AI. Authors, artists, and news organizations have already filed countless copyright lawsuits against AI giants like OpenAI and Microsoft, finding that AI bots can speak “too precisely” about their copyrighted works—suggesting that the works are included in the AI’s training data.
That's why Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's AI CEO, was asked at the Aspen Ideas Festival in late June whether AI companies had essentially stolen the world's intellectual property.
Suleyman's answer? With one possible exception, almost all content on the Internet is approved for training an AI.
Related: Microsoft-affiliated AI startup is being sued by the world's biggest record labels
“I think the social contract for content that’s already available on the open web since the ’90s has been that it’s fair use,” Suleyman said.
Suleyman explained that “anyone” can copy or recreate the content on the open web.
“That was the highway,” he said. “That was the agreement.”
However, some news sites and publishers have requested that no scraping or crawling be done.
“This is a grey area and I think it will find its way through the courts,” Suleyman said.
Mustafa Suleiman. Photographer: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Suleyman leads Microsoft AI at a time when Microsoft has invested billions in the technology, and his position on what is and isn't fair use highlights how AI companies can defend themselves against intellectual property claims in court.
OpenAI, for example, reportedly used more than a million hours of YouTube videos to train ChatGPT. When asked whether YouTube or social media videos were used to create OpenAI's video generator Sora, the company's chief technical officer Mira Murati said, “We used publicly available data and licensed data,” and declined to elaborate.
AI also seems to be gobbling up the work of other AIs, resulting in lower quality output. Experts predict that within the next two years, 90% of online content will be generated by AI.
Related: The most downloaded news app in the US may have published dozens of fake stories written by AI
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