OpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free

OpenAI is begging the British Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it's supposedly "impossible" for the company to train its artificial intelligence models — and continue growing its multi-billion-dollar business — without them.

As The Telegraph reports, the AI firm said in a filing submitted to a House of Lords subcommittee that using only content from the public domain would be insufficient to train the kind of large language models (LLMs) it's building, suggesting that the company must therefore be allowed to use copyrighted material.

"Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression — including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents — it would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials," the company wrote in the evidence filing. "Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today's citizens."

OpenAI went on to insist in the document, submitted before the House of Lords' communications and digital committee, that it complies with copyright laws and that the company believes "legally copyright law does not forbid training."

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