People may find AI impressive because, as individuals, we only have access to a tiny fraction of the world’s best creative works due to copyright protection and limited purchasing power, whereas AI has been trained on so much copyrighted material that virtually only creators can discover that AI-generated content is derived from their original works. No wonder many people see AI-generated works as novel and useful. However, the truth is that machines cannot think, reason, understand or imagine, so AI cannot produce or discover anything new and valuable.
As generative AI becomes popular, lawsuits against AI companies are piling up. The question is whether these companies have the right to train their AI models with anything available on the Internet without asking the original copyright holders for permission. Back in 2002, Google launched a project to digitize books and magazines. The project was the subject of a number of copyright infringement lawsuits, and Google managed to win on the basis of the fair use clause in 2015.
I believe it’s in the public interest for all copyrighted works to be freely available to everyone, because there’s no point in placing valuable content behind a paywall that attracts few visitors, while allowing the Internet to be flooded with worthless information that wastes our time and resources. I’m also in favor of compensating authors, because only if creators are paid well for their quality work will more masterpieces be produced.
I propose voluntary payment for digital products, so that we can have free access to all creative works and then voluntarily pay for valuable ones. People decide for themselves how valuable a creative work is, and how much to pay for it. For example, you may pay a lot for a book you found very useful, while I may refuse to pay for the same book because it didn’t help me. Since we spend our money carefully, the total amount we pay for a work can be used to determine its value and enable creators to obtain value-based remuneration.
Voluntary payments could give human intelligence a big leap forward, as people get smarter from a sea of masterpieces, while good creators get richer from voluntary payments. Our intelligence will be enriched by human masterpieces far more than by AI-generated content if everyone has free access to all creative works in digital form.
