Trump's bombshell to creators: 'AI wants your content, but Big Tech need not pay'
President also backs US state ban on AI regulation and issues warning to Europe
WHAT’S HAPPENED?
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump last night firmly backed Big Tech in its fight with publishers and creators over the use of their works to train AI models. Hours after the White House issued its AI Action Plan which made no mention of copyright, Trump told a Washington audience of tech leaders and investors the US needed a “common sense application of artificial [intelligence] and intellectual property rules” in order to maintain its AI supremacy.
“You can’t be expected to have a successful AI programme when every single article, book, or anything else that you’ve read or studied, you’re supposed to pay for. ‘Gee, I read a book. I’m supposed to pay somebody.’ And you know, we appreciate that. But you just can’t do it because it’s not doable,” said Trump.
“I think most of the people in the room know what I mean. When a person reads a book or an article, you’ve gained great knowledge. That does not mean that you’re violating copyright laws, or have to make deals with every content provider. China’s not doing it ... and you have to be able to play by the same set of rules.”
Trump said the hi-techs would not be able to “copy or plagiarise an article”. “But, if you read an article and learn from it, we have to allow AI to use that pool of knowledge without going through the complexity of contract negotiations of which there would be thousands for every time we use AI.”
As we reported yesterday, the Trump admin’s AI Action Plan called for US states that enact and enforce AI regulations to lose out on federal AI funding. In his speech at the Winning the AI Race summit hosted by the All-In Podcast and the Hill and Valley Forum, Trump went further and called for a “single federal standard, not 50 different states regulating this industry of the future”. Acknowledging that this was an unpopular view Trump said “you can’t have one state holding you up, you can’t have three or four states holding you up, you can’t have a state with standards that are so high that it’s going to hold you up”.
“If you are operating under 50 different sets of state laws, the most restrictive state of all will be the one that rules. You could have a state run by a crazy governor, a governor that hates you, a governor that is not smart or maybe a governor that is very smart but decides that he doesn’t like the industry and he can put you out of business because you are going to have to go to that lowest common denominator.
“We need one common sense federal standard that supersedes all states and supersedes everybody so you don’t end up in litigation with 43 states at one time. You’ve got to go litigation free. It is the only way.”
Trump said his administration would also “have to watch Europe and Asia and all foreign countries so they don’t make rules and regulations that likewise make it impossible for you to do business, and where you have to make everything in AI cater to them”. “Because again, you’d have to cater to the toughest country or toughest state. You can’t do that because it would ruin it.”
WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
✨ Trump’s justifications for not paying publishers and creators are straight out of the AI lobbyists’ playbook and featured in our ever-popular AI-Copyright Deniers’ Bingo Card. The idea that AI model training is no different to human learning was first concocted by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last October and later developed by the Tony Blair Institute in a pro-tech report on AI and copyright in April this year. The notion that paying creators is too complex was floated in October 2023 by venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz in a submission to the US Copyright Office which said it would be “impossible to identify who the relevant rights holders are, and thus there would be no viable way to get statutory royalties to the proper parties”. Yet copyright licensing and collecting societies are able to do this as a matter of course. It’s a mystery why Trump’s remarks on AI and copyright weren’t included in the White House AI Action Plan, and why the plan didn’t go further and recommend a single federal-only set of AI regulations. His warning to “Europe and Asia and all foreign countries” seeking to enforce their own AI regulations and copyright laws doubtless heralds threatened sanctions through additional trade tariffs.
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