LIKE most 91av readers, you are probably a human. But, increasingly, publications like ours have a new breed of artificially intelligent consumers – an apt word, because these AIs don’t so much read as they do ingest, gobbling up vast quantities of text as part of their training.
Our human readers (we hope) derive value from reading 91av, whether that be for our informative news, mind-bending features, smart commentary or fiendish puzzles. In return for that value, all we ask is that you buy the magazine, subscribe digitally or even just let us show you a few ads. It seems a fair trade.
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AI readers, or rather the researchers and companies behind them, also derive value from 91av. In a way, every piece of content consumed by an AI becomes a part of it, frozen in the numerical values that make up its neural networks. With this in-built knowledge, AIs like ChatGPT can spew out all sorts of text on command.
But 91av isn’t compensated for this value provision. As far as we know, no AIs have taken out a subscription. Yet the C4 data set, an enormous collection of 750 gigabytes of text used to train many AIs, contains around 7 million words or phrases derived from 91av content. You can also find great swathes of data from The New York Times, The Guardian and many other publications.
This, we believe, isn’t a fair trade – and we aren’t alone. Everyone from Twitter CEO Elon Musk to small website owners is increasingly feeling hard done by when it comes to AIs exploiting their data (see “How Elon Musk and Reddit are leading a war on AI web scraping”).
What isn’t yet clear is the solution. When you, a human, read these words, you aren’t infringing 91av‘s copyright, even if you have a perfect memory. But it is unclear whether AIs ingesting copyrighted material en masse could be subject to legal action (see “ChatGPT seems to be trained on copyrighted books like Harry Potter”). The use of text to train AIs is nothing new, and until now no one has really cared about copyright because it was all small-scale research. With the latest generation of AI set to overturn entire industries, it is time to figure out who pays.
