In its submission to the Australian government’s review of the regulatory framework around AI, Google said that copyright law should be altered to allow for generative AI systems to scrape the internet.
That’s a different goalpost. I get the difference between 8 billion brains, and 8 billion instances of the same AI. That has nothing to do with whether there is a difference in copyright infringement, though.
If you want another goalpost, that IMHO is more interesting: let’s discuss the difference between 8 billion brains with up to 100 years life experience each, vs. just a million copies of an AI with the experience of all human knowledge each.
(That’s still not really what’s happening, which is tending more towards several billion copies of AIs with vast slices of human knowledge each).
It’s all theoretical at this stage, but like everything else that society waits until it’s too late for, I think it’s reasonable to be cautious and not just let AI go unregulated.
It’s not reasonable to regulate stuff before it gets developed. Regulation means establishing some limits and controls on something, which can’t be reasonably defined before that “something” even exists, much less tested or decided whether the regulation has whatever desired effects it intends.
For what is worth, a “theoretical regulation” already exists: it’s the Asimov’s Rules of Robotics. Turns out current AIs are not robots, and that regulation is nonsense when applied to stable diffusion or LLMs.
