Multiple record publishers are suing Anthropic over its alleged use of copyrighted song lyrics. Getty Images sued Stability AI earlier this year for using its library to train an image generator. Companies like Google, Microsoft, and Adobe have promised to indemnify companies that face legal threats for using their A.I. products. The actors’ and writers’ unions in Hollywood even went on strike this summer in no small part to halt the studios’ threats to use A.I. to replace them. Silicon Valley has “disrupted” multiple industries over the years by moving fast and breaking things, so to speak. This time, the affected industries are trying to slow down and stop tech start-ups so they don’t get “settled” in the first place.
One solution to which I alluded earlier would be to simply pay to use the copyrighted material. Some major tech companies that can afford to do it already do. But Andreessen Horowitz doesn’t want to do that. “A staggering quantity of individual works is required to train AI models,” the firm told the U.S. Copyright Office. “That means that, under any licensing framework that provided for more than negligible payment to individual rights holders, AI developers would be liable for tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year in royalty payments.” That would create an “impossibly high financial barrier to AI development” for “small businesses or individual innovators.”
That would also be bad for Andreessen Horowitz, which probably would not have invested billions of dollars in A.I. start-ups just for them to spend billions of dollars on royalties. It runs counter to the zeitgeist that animates Silicon Valley’s A.I. push. The fundamental goal of A.I. is to reap the benefits of creative or intellectual labor without having to pay a human being—writers, artists, musicians, lawyers, journalists, architects, and so on—to perform it. A.I. developers, in other words, seek to create something from nothing. But that is not how the laws of thermodynamics work. And unless the courts and federal regulators suddenly embrace the tech industry’s novel new theory of fair use, it will not be how the laws of copyright work either.