IImagine someone driving a high-end sports car to a pub. £1.5 million Koenigsegg Regerapark and saunter out of your car to pick one at random. They come to the pub where you’re drinking, start walking around the patrons, slip their hands into their visible pockets, and smile at you as they pull out your wallet and empty it of cash and cards.
Not-so-sophisticated pickpockets will stop if you ask out loud, “What the hell are you doing?” “We apologize for the inconvenience,” says Suri. “It’s an opt-out system, dude.”
It sounds ridiculous. But this appears to be the approach the government is pursuing to appease AI companies. A consultation meeting will be held soon, Financial Times coverageThis will allow AI companies to scrape content from individuals and organizations unless they explicitly opt out of having their data used.
The AI revolution is both rapid and comprehensive. Even if you’re not one of them, 200 million people If you log on to ChatGPT every week or dabble in generative AI competitors like Claude or Gemini, you’ve undoubtedly interacted with an AI system, knowingly or not. But to keep the AI fire from burning out, we need two constantly replenishing sources. One is energy. This is why AI companies are getting into the nuclear power plant acquisition business. And the other thing is data.
Data is essential to AI systems because it helps them recreate how we interact. If the AI has any “knowledge”, which is highly disputed given that it is actually a fancy pattern matching machine, it comes from the data used to train it. .
In some studies, large-scale language models such as ChatGPT Training data is missing By 2026, that appetite will be huge. But without that data, the AI revolution could stall. Tech companies know this, which is why they license content from left, right, and center. But it has created friction, and an unofficial mantra has continued in the sector over the past decade.move fast and break things” causes no friction.
This is why they are already trying to steer us towards an opt-out approach to copyright, rather than an opt-in regime, where everything we type, post and share is locked in until we say no. It is destined to become AI training data by default. Companies must ask us to use their data. We can already see how companies are nudging us towards this reality. This week, X began notifying users of changes to its terms of service that will allow all posts to be used for the following purposes: train grokElon Musk’s AI model designed to compete with ChatGPT. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, then made similar changes, resulting in the widespread urban legend of “Goodbye Meta AI,” which purportedly invalidates legal agreements.
It’s clear why AI companies want an opt-out system. If you ask most people if they want to use something in the books they write, the music they produce, or the posts and photos they share on social networks to train an AI, they’ll probably say no. And the gears of the AI revolution will turn off. Why the government would want to enable such a change to the concept of copyright ownership that has existed to date. over 300 yearsis stipulated by law. 100 or moreit’s not so obvious. But like many things, it seems to come down to money.
The government faces lobbying from big tech companies suggesting this is a requirement for the country to be considered as a place to invest in AI innovation and share the spoils. A lobbying document prepared by Google suggests support for its approach to an opt-out copyright regime.guarantee uk In the future, it could become a competitive arena for developing and training AI models. ”So the government’s discussion of how to frame the issue, with opt-out options already on the table as a countermeasure, is a major victory for big tech lobbyists.
With so much money flowing into the tech industry and high levels of investment going into AI projects, Keir Starmer understandably doesn’t want to miss out on the potential benefits. It would be remiss of the Government not to consider how to appease the tech companies developing world-changing technology and help turn the UK into an AI powerhouse.
But this is not the answer. To be clear, the copyright system in question in the UK means that companies effectively own every post we make, every book we write, every book we create. This means it will be possible to add nicknames to songs and to our data without being penalized. That requires us to sign up to every individual service and say, “No, we don’t want you to chop up our data and spit out a poor composite image of us.” The number can number in the hundreds, from large technology companies to small research institutes.
Lest we forget, OpenAI – now Over $150 billion – The company plans to abandon its original nonprofit principles and become a for-profit company. Rather than relying on the charity of the general public, we have enough funds in our coffers to pay for our training data. Surely such companies can afford to line their pockets, not ours. So please let go.
Source: www.theguardian.com
