Post: If you don’t let us scrape copyrighted content, we will lose out to China says OpenAI as it tries to influence US government

OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 5, 2022. The Trump administration is still asking for public comment on their AI Action plan. And, wouldn’t you know it? OpenAI has more than a few thoughts it would like to share with the US government. Namely, it would quite like its AI products to continue to be allowed to scrape copyrighted material, please and thank you.

Ahead of the March 15 deadline , OpenAI set out a number of proposals for the US government, which the company also shared in summary on its public blog . The point that stands out to me is titled “A copyright strategy that promotes the freedom to learn,” which encourages the US government to “avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the [People’s Republic of China] by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.”

OpenAI, particularly ChatGPT, is no stranger to gobbling up copyrighted material as training data, with the company arguing last year there’s just no way around it . The submitted proposal argues that OpenAI’s models are not fully replicating copyrighted material for public consumption but are instead learning “patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights” from the works.

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OpenAI makes the case that, therefore, its “AI model training aligns with the core objectives of copyright and the fair use doctrine, using existing works to create something wholly new and different without eroding the commercial value of those existing works.”

OpenAI’s proposal also broadly casts a dim view on AI legislation currently being discussed outside of the US. For example, OpenAI’s proposal criticises the EU and UK’s opt-out provisions for copyright holders, […]

If you don’t let us scrape copyrighted content, we will lose out to China says OpenAI as it tries to influence US government