Reading · Ben Schmidt's Blog

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|title: "AI and Copyright"| |categories: \[Humanities, Degrees\]| |date: 2023-09-23T13:36:45-04:00| |lastmod: 2023-09-23T13:36:45-04:00| |featured: false| |draft: true| I am a onetime history professor, now working as the vice president of [Nomic](https://atlas.nomic.ai), a technology startup building technology to make modern large language models more democratic: that is, easier to use, easier to access. As a historian, I was concerned especially with ways to preserve, surface, and analyze the enormous stores of culture heritage that digitization made available. For both of these goals, an novel reading of copyright law to complicate tools for generative AI. In the last year, there has been a sea change in the significance that people bring to questions of copyright. In the last 25 years, copyright has mostly felt like a give-and-take between creators and consumers: digital technologies have provided ways of downloading works without allowing artists (or their heirs, or the corporations that acquired the copyright to their works) the ability to be compensated. What has emerged more recently -- especially in the visual arts, but also for text -- is a dynamic where an existing class of creators, fearful for an erosion of their status in a new regime, The language workers most impacted by generative AI -- translators, proofreaders, editors, writers of contracts -- have no significant recourse of copyright at all. The fuzzy, approximate 'readings' of books that are retained in the memory of a trained neural network are not in any sense copies themselves. The last time that copyright concerns were so pressing in my world involved the attempts to contain the explosion of questions brought about by Google's [quiet, methodical scanning of tens of millions of books from academic libraries](https://books.google.com). Google and the libraries were both sued by the Authors' Guild. One of the more alarming features that has been emerging is a conflation of retaining the rights of copyright with other, far more important concerns around personal privacy. But the forces most eager to expand the powers of copyright are not--to put it mildly--the friends of artists. Our office is a block north of the Warner Brothers Discover office in New York City, and for the past months we have bee\.. Having myself been lightly involved in the scriptwriting process for a few years,

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