A number of recent AI court cases had the usual bunch celebrating AI Tech Bros’ success at being deemed free to use any IP within their models without consent or compensation. But those cheerleaders do what they do with all things AI and claim one thing when the actuality is far different. Firstly, direct competition was not proven, but “watering out of the market” was literally presented by one judge as an argument to be used in a future case. In addition, Anthropic (Anthropic and Meta had the two biggest cases) was found to be on the hook for direct copyright infringement when they knowingly used torrents to get the materials of others that they used (spoiler: so did Meta, there is even evidence that Zuckerberg condoned it). And given the damages for each instance could be up to $150,000, and there were like 7 million occurrences, the damages should be in the billions of dollars. Anthropic recently petitioned the court to “ignore” (ie. “stay”) the part about their copyright infringement because it could bankrupt them. The court, thankfully, denied the stay. But here is what is amazing: AI companies’ main argument is that they couldn’t create their product if they had to follow the law (or pay people for the IP they stole to use). And then when they knowingly directly broke a law, they say that the law should now no longer apply to them because it would make it really hard for their company to survive.
Let’s see what would happen if we applied this to other cases: A murderer makes the argument that their murdering someone should be ignored, because, you know, life in prison would make them living their life free impossible. Or a grocery store sneaks onto farms at night and steals all the crops, and then when caught says that they shouldn’t have to pay for their theft because the grocery store might not financially survive, and people do really need food to eat. Or, for ironical purposes, imagine DeepSeek claiming that their stealing OpenAI’s IP should be legal because they couldn’t have created their model without it.
The argument that AI companies are above the law because their product is more valuable than their billions of dollars in theft is beyond stupid. They could license the IP, but it would cost them. And they are money-hungry @$$holes, so they will make any and every argument that tries to favor them. Here’s a question for you: Out of all the things that AI has offered, how much do you actually use and need? 5% of it? And how much are you paying for it? $0? $20/month? I can’t say that it seems like the best business or mot useful product if you look at it realistically. One thing for sure is that an MIT study shows that reliance on ChatGPT literally makes you more stupid.
