In a fascinating interview before the OpenAI Board brouhaha, Sam Altman discussed the controversy over training AI models on copyrighted works without permission of the authors and artists.
Kevin Roose: Sam, I want to ask you about something else that people are not happy about when it comes to these language uh and image models which is this issue of copyright I think a lot of people view what open aai and other companies did which is sort of you know hoovering up work from across the internet using it to train these models that can in some cases output things that are similar to the work of living authors or writers uh or artists and they just think like this is the original sin of the AI industry and we are never going to forgive them for doing this what do you think about that and what would you say to artists or writers who just think that this was a moral lapse forget about the legal whether you’re allowed to do it or not that it was just unethical for you and other companies to do that in the first place.
Sam Altman: We block that stuff like you can’t go to like DALL-E and generate something I mean you could speaking of being annoyed like we may be too aggressive on that but I think I think it’s the right thing to do until we figure out some sort of economic model that works for people and you know we’re doing some things there now but we’ve got more to do other people in the industry like do allow quite a lot of that and I get why artists are annoyed.
Kevin Roose: I guess I’m talking less about the output question than just the the act of taking all of this work much of it copyrighted without the explicit permission of the people who created it and using it to train these models. What would you say to the people who just say that Sam that was that was the wrong move you should have asked and we will never forgive you for it.
Sam Altman: Well, first of all, like always have empathy for people who are like hey you did this thing and it’s affecting me and you know we didn’t talk about it first or it was just like a new thing. I do think that in the same way humans can read the internet and learn AI should be allowed to read the internet and learn. Shouldn’t be regurgitating shouldn’t be you know violating any copyright laws. But if we’re really going to say that like AI doesn’t get to read the internet and learn and if you read a physics textbook and learn how to do a physics calculation not every time you do that in the rest of your life like you got to like figure out how to like that seems like not a good solution to me.
But, on individuals’ private work, yeah we try not to train on that stuff we we really don’t want to be here upsetting people again I think other people in the industry have taken different approaches and we’ve also done some things that I think now that we understand more we will do differently in the future.
Kevin Roose: Like what?
Sam Altman: Like what we do differently? We want to figure out new economic models so that say if you’re an artist we don’t just totally block you we don’t just not train on your data which a lot of artists also say no I want this in here I want like whatever but we have a way to like help share revenue with you gpts are maybe going to be an interesting first example of this because people will be able to put private data in there and say hey use this version and they’re yeah having a share around it.
Full interview with Kevin Roose of The New York Tiimes: