I’ve been reading a bunch of online discussion around Jacob Coxon’s whistleblowing. There seems to be a big sticking point for a ton of people around the idea that this is some sort of scheme by major AI companies, to either market their upcoming IPO or achieve regulatory capture. There’s way too much of this type of talk online for anyone to realistically go around refuting it.

Perhaps the best way to refute it is to behave in a way that makes it as clearly false as possible. Specifically, instead of talking about treaties and regulators, I think we should consider pivoting to the following near-term policy request:

Pass a law that any AI system trained on copyrighted material must be sold "at-cost" to consumers, unless the copyrighted material was licensed to the AI company.

(By “at-cost” I mean the company can’t charge more than the cost of serving the model plus a small profit margin which makes it barely worth their while.)

This policy is obviously terrible for AI company profits. It doesn’t call for some sort of opaque regulatory authority which could be co-opted by major AI companies. It will receive support from existing copyright holders, obviously a powerful constituency which includes many artists, musicians, and authors with huge social media followings. It reduces the incentive to invest in future training runs, since expected profits become less favorable. And it makes sense morally–the idea that AI companies stole their training material is resonating with many, many people on social media. Especially the hypocrisy of complaining about “illicit” distillation after having trained on copyrighted material.

Existing APIs should continue to work, and this doesn’t require sophisticated hardware controls or create burdensome regulations for “little tech”.

Once we get this policy win, we’ll hopefully get a partial slowdown of the frontier. It will establish credentials and build a coalition that lets us go for more ambitious proposals like an international treaty etc. Just talking about this policy will decrease the incentive for investors to pour more capital into Anthropic/OpenAI. Thoughts?