Has anyone who contributed to producing the wealth of human knowledge, art, code, and literature making up the training data been compensated in any way?
I'm certainly still waiting for my check.
I'm certainly still waiting for my check.
Yes: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-settlement-lawsuit-cop...
Exploitation of those rights is down to individuals, only since Google came on the scene has any company been able to get away with broad ranging infringement of these rights without censure.
As for your cheque, you have the right to sell your work. No-one is obliged to buy it, of course. You also, under copyright, have the right to make a license to exchange use of your works for binding the users to conditions of release of their derivative/associated works ([F]OSS licensing).
You still have the right to sell it, and if ML models have been trained on those works you have the right to seek compensation.
You might say that the fact LLMs are being provided as services by big techs invalidate that. But some people taking the provided knowledge for themselves has also always happened. More importantly, though, is that big tech provided LLMs aren't the only way to access the technology. Open weights and local models exist.
They are not databases of facts. Even if they were, that would still constitute a very serious violation. They aren’t, and they’re not particularly good at serving that function either.
No, LLMs are capable of reproducing things (text, art, other media) based on their training data. Consider being an artist who produced something original that somehow made it into that training set - your chances of actually making a living are now vastly smaller.
The result is the same as if there was no copyright at all: Big companies will just exploit whoever, no art would be produced.
This is a huge issue, and there needs to be a reckoning.
You're probably also capable of reproducting some art off the top of your head, your existence doesn't somehow violate copyright.
Besides, anything they're reproducing is the work of very successful artists whose work is widespread. Anyone who had their worked looked at once during training isn't being affected anymore than some artist who never had anything of theirs looked at.
Also, copyright benefits big companies much more than it benefits artists, by the way. Not being able to take any art for free and requiring to pay is a great trade-off for getting a monopoly over anything they pay for. Art would still be made regardless, just like it was before and just like it is right now even when, outside of these big corporations who mostly respect it, copyright is constantly infringed upon.