OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies’ unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.
Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity’s creative output overall.
OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren’t substitutes for original works.
So far, one landmark ruling favored rights holders, with a judge declaring AI training is not fair use, as AI outputs clearly threatened to replace Thomson-Reuters’ legal research firm Westlaw in the market, Wired reported. But OpenAI now appears to be looking to Trump to avoid a similar outcome in its lawsuits, including a major suit brought by The New York Times.
“OpenAI’s models are trained to not replicate works for consumption by the public. Instead, they learn from the works and extract patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights,” OpenAI claimed. “This means our AI model training aligns with the core objectives of copyright and the fair use doctrine, using existing works to create something wholly new and different without eroding the commercial value of those existing works.”
Providing “freedom-focused” recommendations on Trump’s plan during a public comment period ending Saturday, OpenAI suggested Thursday that the US should end these court fights by shifting its copyright strategy to promote the AI industry’s “freedom to learn.” Otherwise, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will likely continue accessing copyrighted data that US companies cannot access, supposedly giving China a leg up “while gaining little in the way of protections for the original IP creators,” OpenAI argued.
