Extract from Joe Patrice’s article “DOJ Tells Court AI Training Is Fair Use, Forgets To Mention It’s Negotiating A Stake In OpenAI“
The Justice Department filed a statement of interest in the sprawling OpenAI copyright case, declaring the administration’s official position that training a large language model on copyrighted text amounts to fair use. From the DOJ’s perspective, it is indeed a matter of national security that authors and publications receive nothing as reams and reams of their otherwise protected material gets fed into the maw of ChatGPT to build out the weighted text-generation engine to help a high school student finish their book report.
The brief is bad, though it stumbles toward the correct legal conclusion. Assuming OpenAI acquired the material legally — and that hasn’t always been the case with AI training — it should be fair use to train a model, with caveats for making sure the model isn’t spitting back the exact text on the back end like a copying machine. But, since we’re talking about this Department of Justice, this is more a case of even a corrupt clock being right twice a day.
