The AI companies' battle-tested plan to keep using our content without paying for it
The AI companies see copyright as the biggest danger to their business right now — and are already to working to eliminate the threat.
Happy 2024, everyone —
Hope the new year’s been rolling out nicely for you all. I myself took a whole week and change off, entirely away from the keyboard, and it proved an experience so delightful that I might just have to try it again sometime.
A THWARTED ATTEMPT TO LOG OFF
In fact, in anticipation of the time off — I went north to Tahoe, where it snowed, how nice — I looked into options for switching to a dumb phone or such, to go completely offline for a couple weeks. It turns out there aren’t many good ones.
Apparently, until recently, certain plans and phones would allow users to simply switch out the SIM card and use a dumb phone on a regular plan — if, say, you wanted to get away from the iPhone for the weekend. Now that Apple’s switched to an e-Sim, that’s harder now. I reached out to the folks at Light Phone, which makes a great-looking grayscale phone, and they said I’d need a dedicated plan, with its own phone number and all that. That seemed a bit much — $30 a month, plus the cost of the phone, plus the hassle of making sure everyone had the new phone number. The New York Times’ Kashmir Hill published a fun piece about switching to a dumb phone for a month — guess phone fatigue is in the air — but switching was apparently a pain, and not something that could be done easily enough to make it an option for a vacation or random weekend.
All of which is to say: There should be a better way to do this! To ‘downgrade’ from an iPhone or Android phone for short-term periods. Admittedly, I didn’t research all that long, but given that there’s a whole cottage industry that’s sprung up around worrying that we’re on our phones too much, I was surprised there weren’t obvious solutions. Obviously, tech companies don’t *want* us to spend less time on our screens, so have a vested interest in making this hard to do. But still; seems like there would be a market for such a thing.
Okay this sounds like it’s turning into a column — drop a line if you have ideas here, or know something I don’t about part-time dumb phones.
THE AI INDUSTRY HAS A COPYRIGHT PROBLEM
As 2023 opened, the biggest story was the rise of OpenAI and generative AI. As 2024 opens, the biggest story is the barrage of copyright lawsuits the industry is now facing, filed by humans who say one reason generative AI is so impressive is that it was trained on their work. Without consent or compensation, naturally.
Of course, Silicon Valley has faced down fights like these before — though perhaps never one so broad and united against it, and accompanied by public trepidation over the technology in question — and so it has a plan to confront the copyright question already in hand.
That’s this week’s column:
The legal complaints that cropped up throughout last year have grown into a thundering chorus, and the tech companies say they now present an existential threat to generative AI. If 2023 was the year the world marveled at AI content generators, 2024 may be the year that the humans who created the raw materials that made that content possible get their revenge — and maybe even claw back some of the value built on their work.
In the last days of December, the New York Times filed a bombshell lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging that “millions of its articles were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.” The Times’ lawsuit joins a host of others — class-action lawsuits filed by illustrators, by the photo service Getty Images, by George R.R. Martin and the Author’s Guild, by anonymous social media users, to name a few — all alleging that companies that stand to profit from generative AI used the work of writers, reporters, artists and others without consent or compensation, infringing on their copyrights in the process.
BLOOD STUFF
The Blood in the Machine keeps getting some nice coverage, which I’m quite grateful for. It was included in this Bloomberg Tech roundup of books to read to understand the future. It was also the subject of this great essay in Ars Technica, this review in El Pais (one of Spain’s papers of record), along with Gavin Mueller’s great Breaking Things at Work, another nice one in the Cleveland Review of Books that really dives into the gig work angle. Also did a fun interview with the folks at SETI for their Big Picture Science podcast, too. And maybe my favorite of the bunch, this piece by Robert J. Weisberg, who works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, about why museum workers could benefit from listening to the Luddites.
Yahoo! Finance also ran a story with this headline, which I did not realize was newsworthy, though I am more than happy to share my obsession with dystopias with the world.
As always, thanks to everyone who continues to support this thing, it’s much appreciated.
Hammers up for the new year, and more very soon.
Tello sim card with no data costs $5/month.
I’ve thought about the dumb phone thing a bit, too, but I always realize that the thing I’m trying to escape is less my phone and more the VOID it creates. There are too many things I actually like about my phone - podcasts, music, simple games, texts - that I feel like a dumb phone would cut me off from. It’s a nice dream, though!
As for the AI Copyright reckoning, I find it hard to be excited about that after reading Cory Doctorow’s Chokepoint Capitalism and seeing just how much copyright empowers corporations. It feels weird that people are simultaneously excited about AI companies being sued for copyright infringement AND Steamboat Willie going into the public domain. It really feels like we need a different tool to help with both of these issues (like UBI or something, so we can decouple making art from making a living) but that always feels like a pipe dream these days.
Glad the book is getting so much attention! I just finished it a few weeks ago and loved how you closed it out. Super inspiring!