Comment by whateverboat
16 hours ago
I mean, for what it's worth, we have subsidized Anthropic by allowing them to train on copyrighted stuff. (I know it is still legal, and I support the legality, but the economics are what they are with people's content paying a big one time subsidized cost (to the level of at least 500B).
So, the least Anthropic can do is pay it forward.
I am mostly economics illiterate but I understand a subsidy to be an economic concession given by the state to an entity which gives said entity a relative advantage compared to its peers.
In that sense (which could very well be bogus), letting a company violate individual IP of basically every human is less of an economic concession and more of unconsented to IP open season.
Even if one were to drop "economic" from "economic concession" and instead view a subsidy through the lens of a more general concession, one could say that the US Govt gave US AI companies a legal concession to sidestep the copyright protections of other US entities. But the US Govt should only get to undermine the copyright protection of other US entities - who gave American companies the right to violate the copyright of non-Americans?
That's some "download a car", $100000 per infringement pricing logic. No one is paying anyone 500 billion dollars. I'm sure rights owners wanted that, and more too, but it's nonsense to call it a subsidy that they didn't get it.
If we as individuals were sued it surely would be at least an order of magnitude difference between what is required from us vs Anthropic or OpenAI. That’s even completely ignoring the marginal utility of money. It is absolutely a subsidy. It’s just less fair because that power, to pay pennies on the dollar, is only given to corporations.