In addition to the possible business threat, forcing OpenAI to identify its use of copyrighted data would expose the company to potential lawsuits. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E are trained using large amounts of data scraped from the web, much of it copyright protected. When companies disclose these data sources it leaves them open to legal challenges. OpenAI rival Stability AI, for example, is currently being sued by stock image maker Getty Images for using its copyrighted data to train its AI image generator.
Aaaaaand there it is. They don’t want to admit how much copyrighted materials they’ve been using.
Erm… what? No, that’s a massive nonsequiter
Not entirely. I do think that if copyright holders have an argument against AI data scraping, privacy watchdogs will have one as well. But if copyright holders don’t have one, the position of privacy watchdogs will be weaker as well. Mind you, I’m not arguing about legality, I’m fully aware that those are two very different things from a legal perspective. Im arguing from a perspective of policy narratives.