Gewinnwarnung

Weil die Mühlen der Justiz langsam mahlen und freundliche Bitten ziemlich unwirksam sind, verlegen sich Rechteinhaber mittlerweile darauf, notorische Scraper erst einmal zu warnen. Perplexity reagiert auf Warnungen der New York Times zwar mit einer Variation der Freeware-Doktrin von Microsoft –

We believe in transparency and have a public page on our website that clarifies our content policies and how we use web content. We aren’t scraping data for building foundation models, but rather indexing web pages and surfacing factual content as citations to inform responses when a user asks a question. The law recognizes that no one organization owns the copyright over facts. This is what allows us to have a rich and open information ecosystem, not to mention, it gives news organizations the ability to report on topics that were previously covered by another news outlet.

– und bezichtigt die klagende Branche einer technologiefeindlichen adversarial posture, aber das ist natürlich alles nur Geplänkel. Wenn ein Unternehmen nicht nur Billigcontent vertreibt, wird man wie immer eine profitable Lösung zu Lasten der Kreativen finden:

Many writers are celebrating this move as a victory for creative workers’ rights over AI companies, who have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in part by promising our bosses that they can fire us and replace us with algorithms.

But these writers are assuming that just because they’re on Penguin Random House’s side, PRH is on their side. They’re assuming that if PRH fights against AI companies training bots on their work for free, that this means PRH won’t allow bots to be trained on their work at all.

This is a pretty naive take. What’s far more likely is that PRH will use whatever legal rights it has to insist that AI companies pay it for the right to train chatbots on the books we write. It is vanishingly unlikely that PRH will share that license money with the writers whose books are then shoveled into the bot’s training-hopper. It’s also extremely likely that PRH will try to use the output of chatbots to erode our wages, or fire us altogether and replace our work with AI slop.