Submission + - Silicon Valley once again to cash in on other people's products (mercurynews.com)
rtfa0987 writes: Front page of the San Jose Mercury News: "Silicon Valley is poised once again to cash in on other people’s products, making a data grab of unprecedented scale that has already spawned lawsuits and congressional hearings.
"Chatbots and other forms of generative artificial intelligence that burst onto the technology scene in recent months are fed vast amounts of material scraped from the internet — books, screenplays, research papers, news stories, photos, art, music, code and more — to produce answers, imagery or sound in response to user prompts.
"Technology companies are falling over themselves to leverage this new and potentially lucrative technology. Google, valued at $1.5 trillion, has gone all in with its Bard chatbot after rival Microsoft, valued at $2.4 trillion, invested billions in San Francisco’s generative AI pioneer OpenAI. Meta, valued at $680 billion, just announced plans to add chatbots to its apps. Venture capitalists are pouring billions of dollars into generative AI startups."
"But a thorny, contentious and highly consequential issue has arisen: A great deal of the bots’ fodder is copyrighted property...."
"Chatbots and other forms of generative artificial intelligence that burst onto the technology scene in recent months are fed vast amounts of material scraped from the internet — books, screenplays, research papers, news stories, photos, art, music, code and more — to produce answers, imagery or sound in response to user prompts.
"Technology companies are falling over themselves to leverage this new and potentially lucrative technology. Google, valued at $1.5 trillion, has gone all in with its Bard chatbot after rival Microsoft, valued at $2.4 trillion, invested billions in San Francisco’s generative AI pioneer OpenAI. Meta, valued at $680 billion, just announced plans to add chatbots to its apps. Venture capitalists are pouring billions of dollars into generative AI startups."
"But a thorny, contentious and highly consequential issue has arisen: A great deal of the bots’ fodder is copyrighted property...."
