Pay Up Having courted billions of dollars in investment and becoming an unstoppable juggernaut of hype, the generative AI industry should be sitting pretty. But it’s deathly paranoid about one thing: actually having to compensate artists for training AI models using their copyrighted work. Exemplifying those fears, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — one of the biggest financial backers of AI — warned in comments to the US Copyright Office (USCO) that new regulation on training data “will significantly disrupt” investment into the technology and the expectations around it, Insider reports. “The bottom line is this,” the firm wrote. “Imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development.” So in other words, the bottom line is the bottom line — and pesky technicalities like copyright laws shouldn’t stand in the way of that. All the Content According to the VC firm, gobbling up copyrighted content is the “only practical way” of training large language models, the technology that powers chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And the industry should be entitled to a whole lot of that content, too: “something approaching the entire corpus of the written word,” Andreessen Horowitz argued, and “an enormous cross-section of all of the publicly available information ever published on the internet.” Because it believes the usage of this data counts as “fair use,” it argues that AI companies shouldn’t have to pay a dime. An expedient line of thinking, because as…AI Investors Horrified at the Suggestion That They Pay Artists for Using Their Copyrighted Work