1. Because that's exactly what happened when they got caught downloading the entire internet and trained models on it without a license BEFORE that became legal?
Oh and discovery produced a "We trained GPT-3 on pirated stuff! No sharing that!" mail, so it's not like they had any doubt they were committing crimes.
How do you do this? If any normal person did this, punishments doled out for this have been as high as 2 months jail PLUS 150,000 PER INFRINGEMENT (remember how copyright violations were criminalized in the nappster wars? That was never changed back. Oh and remember, OpenAI illegally downloaded those works without a license AND before that was made legal trained a model with it, then made money publicly performing those works and derivatives of those works (which the worst possible copyright offense, effectively republishing other people's works without permission), and on a VERY large scale. So it's at least a risk a court would forbid the result of illegal action from being sold ... in other words no more ChatGPT, OpenAI dead and maybe worse). In theory Sam Altman could be held responsible as a director and could face something like a 200000 year jail sentence given how big the obvious archives are. So of course I would never ever try this, this is not a reasonable risk. But clearly totally ignoring the law was the correct action here. Of course, I'm also pretty damn certain: had I done this, I would have been convicted. This is also not the only such company. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, all took totally unreasonable legal risks that should have totally destroyed these companies when they were a fraction of their current size.
How do you take such a risk? Because the judgements risked here could grow more than big enough to destroy even an extremely rich person Sam Altman financially. Training an AI on hundreds of thousands of pirated works ... is not a reasonable risk to take for someone with ~100 million or so, given the judgements doled out.
Can someone help me make sense of this? Because this is not unique to OpenAI. Uber, paypal, ebay, Facebook, Google ... even Microsoft made early decisions that could have resulted in a court case that would have ended not just the company but any financial future of the founder. And then you have people committing crimes whose companies were taking off ... and who DID get caught with their company and their personal financial future destroyed. Elizabeth Holmes for example. I mean, I sometimes get the impression Elizabeth Holmes lied and that was perfectly fine AS LONG AS she could make it work later. If she merely lied to patients but made her investors money, all would have been forgiven. But how do you make such an assessment.
I'm asking because if large scale violation of the law is allowed, I have no trouble whatsoever coming up with billion dollar company ideas. Think of the Netflix competitor you could create like this! If I'm allowed to damage others, like OpenAI did with copyright, then there is no challenge whatsoever to create a full-self-driving car. If I'm allowed to just fly drones, and do damage to property, then drone delivery is a problem I could solve by the end of next month. Hell, there's technically legal ideas that could easily make a billion dollars except they'll be made illegal the second anyone tries them. The law forbids specific compounds, which are easy to change. So use "non-genetic engineering" (ie. use directed natural selection) to make an opium derivative that isn't one of the forbidden ones and sell it. But obviously congress' representatives will be running into session so fast the only delay will be tripping accidents when they outlaw it and destroy whoever tries it.
Or how about something less dramatic? Say, I take Disney's, Warner Brothers, Paramount, ... historical movies and use AI to vastly improve the animation of their old movies, giving every movie a new, different visual style, then sell the result. Is that a crime? What do I risk doing that? Because of course this is MUCH less damage, relatively speaking, to Disney than what OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic and Alphabet are doing to small authors. (Of course, courts have already demonstrated that they will not be protecting small authors who already have this problem, so now play and app store are being flooded by very obvious game ripoffs)
I'm asking ... how do I predict what large scale law violation I, a non-billionaire, not even a millionnaire, would be allowed to get away with?
2. "The same doesn't exist for operating AI agents or even computers" you have to be joking. The world is full of anti-hacking laws and hacking has long been made criminal. Obviously these actions violate the CFAA, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and if you did this with any kind of program you are still responsible. In fact: how would you do it without using a program?