Ex-Meta exec: Copyright consent obligation = end of AI biz

HELLFIRE

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/27/nick_clegg_says_ai_firms/

… [Sir Nick] Clegg, who served as deputy to David Cameron in a Conservative / Lib Dem coalition that governed the UK between 2010 and 2015 before moving to Zuckcorp as president of global policy affairs, told the audience at a literary festival that demands to make tech firms seek consent from creators before using copyrighted material to train AI models were unworkable. … Because asking their permission after the fact is self-defeating; and admitting that the AI business model is dead unless LLM trainers are allowed to break the law doesn’t sound like much of an argument. …

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/15/house_of_lords_ai_copyright/

“I’m a little bit cautious about the idea of forcing companies that are building AI to enter into bespoke agreements with individual rights holders or an order to pay for content that doesn’t have economic value for them.”

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/28/microsoft_ceo_ai/

“I think that with respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 1990s has been it is fair use,”

Regards

GrumpyCanadian

From the article:

Former British deputy PM and Meta apologist Sir Nick Clegg says that forcing AI companies to ask for the permission of copyright holders before using their content would destroy the AI industry overnight.

Oh! Is that how we do it? Make it so!

More seriously, I think we need a broader discussion about this, rather than just letting the tech companies do whatever they think they want, and worrying about the consequences later. In particular:

What are we getting out of this?
What is the cost of the above?
Is it worth it for anyone, given the staggering amounts of electricity required?
What is the “killer application”?
Who really benefits? If this is really something so important for the future, can we really trust its development exclusively to private, for-profit corporations?