The way I see it, if the NYT goes under (one of the biggest newspapers in the world), all similar outlets also go under. Major publishers, both of fiction and non-fiction, as well as images, video, and all other creative content, may also go under. Hence, there is no more (reliable) training data.
I'm not sure whether that would even be a net loss, TBH. So much commercial media is crap, maybe it would be better for the profit motive to be removed? On the fiction side, there's plenty of fan-fic and indie productions. On the nonfiction side, many indie creators produce better content these days than the big media outlets do. And there still might be room for premium investigative stories done either by a few consolidated wire outlets (Reuters/APNews) or niche publishers (The Information, 404 Media, etc.).
And then there's all the run-of-the-mill small-town journalism that AI would probably be even better at than human reporters: all the sports stories, the city council meetings, the environmental reviews...
If AI makes commercial content publishing unviable, that might actually cut down on all the SEO spam and make the internet smaller and more local again, which would be a good thing IMO.
Your ability to cleanly believe you’ve got a clear read on the challenges, solutions and outcomes from AI for the social/civil/corporate mess that is media, across small to large markets, and chalk it up to “silly IP battles,” is the daily reminder I need on why it was so wrong to give tech the driver’s seat from ~2010 onward.
I read your post several times but still am not sure if I'm reading it correctly. Are you saying the media landscape is more complex than AI can solve?
If so, sure. I wasn't saying that. By "silly IP battles", I meant old guard media companies trying to sue AI out of existence just to defend their IP rather than trying to innovate. Not that different from what we saw with the RIAA and Napster. Somehow the music industry survived and there are more indie artists being discovered all the time.
I don't think this is so much a battle of OpenAI vs NYT but whether copyright law has outlived its usefulness. I think so.
If I misunderstood your reply completely, I apologize.
What I’m saying is tech displays a tremendous amount of hubris in its ability to wrap complex systems in clean tech protocols, ask/pressure/demand users to switch to the tech version of the complex system, and then deny or ignore their innovation doesn’t, at a minimum, come with a rash of negative side effects caused specifically by the inexact or deliberately mangled version in the technical protocol.
Ie:
- social relations -> social networks
- customer service -> chatbots and Jira
- media -> AI news, if the silly IP battles get out of the way.
- residential housing and vacations -> home swap markets
- jobs -> gig jobs, minus the benefits, plus an algorithm for a boss
I’m not sure how many other industries tech has to wade into, disrupt, creative intense negative externalities if you don’t have equity in the companies, leave, and repeat, prior to industries getting protective finally - like this lawsuit
Great. I will start a company to generate training data then. I will hire all those journalists. I won't make the content public. Instead I will charge OpenAI/Tesla/Anthropic millions of dollars to give them access to the content.
