CMU School of Drama


Monday, March 10, 2025

AI and Copyright: Expanding Copyright Hurts Everyone—Here’s What to Do Instead

Electronic Frontier Foundation: You shouldn't need a permission slip to read a webpage–whether you do it with your own eyes, or use software to help. AI is a category of general-purpose tools with myriad beneficial uses. Requiring developers to license the materials needed to create this technology threatens the development of more innovative and inclusive AI models, as well as important uses of AI as a tool for expression and scientific research.

1 comment:

Josh Hillers said...

Initially I was skeptical of the outright claim of the article that the expansion of copyright into the training of AI models ought not be pursued on the basis that instead of these models being used for research, they are now more often used for user output and therefore serve as a product, complicating this situation. But, extensive discussion about the implication of this expansion and how it would further eliminate competition in this market well convinced me of what the article is arguing for. Expanding copyright into this domain extensively would be immensely harmful to the development of these programs and may in the near future increase barriers to accessing these kinds of technology as costs rise to create these models and thus cost may end up on the user in particular circumstances. More concerningly, companies that have these large datasets may leverage them to expand their business in training models on their datasets and thwart any competitors by restricting their use of this dataset, making their model worse and potentially driving them out of this particular industry. In general there are important market considerations for generative AI before copyright law significantly changes.