Slashdot reader Joshuark shared from this report Windows Center
Microsoft may have opened a can of worms with recent comments from Mustafa Suleiman, the tech giant’s chief AI officer. The CEO spoke with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Aspen Ideas Festival earlier this week. Suleiman argued in his speech that all content shared on the internet can be used for AI education unless the content creator specifically says otherwise.
The whole discussion was interesting – but this particular question was very direct. The CNBC interviewer specifically said, “There are a number of authors here… and there are a number of journalists. And it seems like a lot of the data that’s been taught over the years is from the Internet, and some of it is the open Internet, and some of it isn’t, and we’re OpenAI- We’ve heard stories of how he turned YouTube videos into transcripts and then trained on the transcripts.”
The question becomes who owns the IP, who gets value from the IP, and to put it very bluntly, whether AI companies are effectively stealing the world’s IP. Solomon begins his answer – at 2:40 p.m – “Yes, I think – look, it’s a very fair argument.”
SULEYMAN: “I think that when it comes to content that’s already on the open internet, the social contract of that content since the 90s is that it’s fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate it, reproduce it. It’s free software if you want.
“There’s a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization has clearly said, ‘Don’t scrape or crawl me for any reason other than to index me so that other people can find that content.'” That’s a gray area, and I think , it will work its way through the courts.”
Q: So what do you mean when you say it’s a “grey area”?
SULEIMAN: “Well, if – by now some people have taken this information … but it’s going to be sued, and I think it’s rightfully so …
“You know, look, the economics of information is about to change fundamentally because we’re going to reduce the cost of producing knowledge to zero. It’s a very hard thing for people to intuit—but in 15 or 20 years’ time, we’re going to have almost zero marginal cost of new we will produce scientific cultural knowledge. Our species, as a human organism, is more than just an engine of intellectual production, our science can turbo-charge discovery and invention, making us better.”