Michael Hiltzik: AI investors say they'll go broke if they have to pay for copyrighted works. Don't believe it
Followers of high finance are familiar with the old principle of privatizing profits and socializing losses — that is, treating the former as the rightful property of investors and shareholders while sticking the public with the latter. It's the principle that gave us taxpayer bailouts of big banks and the auto companies during the last recession.
Investors in artificial intelligence are taking the idea one step further in fighting against lawsuits filed by artists and writers asserting that the AI development process involves copyright infringement on a massive scale.
The AI folks say that nothing they're doing infringes copyright. But they also argue that their technology itself is so important to the future of the human race that no obstacles as trivial as copyright law should stand in their way.
They say that if they're forced to pay fees to copyright holders simply for using their creative works to "train" AI chatbots and other such programs, most AI firms might be forced out of business.
Frank Landymore of had perhaps the most irreducibly succinct reaction to this assertion:
