Long term, if no one is given credit for their research, either the creators will start to wall off their content or not create at all. Both options would be sad.
A humane attribution comment from the AI could go a long way - "I think I read something about this <topic X> in the NYTimes <link> on January 3rd, 2021."
It appears that without attribution, long term, nothing moves forward.
AI loses access to the latest findings from humanity. And so does the public.
Would it be more rigorous for AI to cite its sources? Sure, but the same could be said for humans too. Wikipedia editors, scholars, and scientists all still struggle with proper citations. NYT itself has been caught plagiarizing[1].
But that doesn't really solve the underlying issue here: That our copyright laws and monetization models predate the Internet and the ease of sharing/paywall bypass/piracy. The models that made sense when publishing was difficult and required capital-intensive presses don't necessarily make sense in the copy and paste world of today. Whether it's journalists or academics fighting over scraps just for first authorship (while some random web dev makes 3x more money on ad tracking), it's just not a long-term sustainable way to run an information economy.
I'd also argue that attribution isn't really that important to most people to begin with. Stuff, real and fake, gets shared on social media all the time with limited fact-checking (for better or worse). In general, people don't speak in a rigorous scholarly way. And people are often wrong, with faulty memories, or even incentivized falsehoods. Our primate brains aren't constantly in fact-checking mode and we respond better to emotional, plot-driven narratives than cold statistics. There are some intellectuals who really care deeply about attributions, but most humans won't.
Taken the above into consideration:
1) Useful AI does not necessarily require attribution
2) AI piracy is just a continuation of decades of digital piracy, and the solutions that didn't work in the 1990s and 2000s still won't work against AI
3) We need some better way to fund human creativity, especially as it gets more and more commoditized
4) This is going to happen with or without us. Cat's outta the bag.
I don't think using old IP law to hold us back is really going to solve anything in the long term. Yes, it'd be classy of OpenAI to pay everyone it sourced from, but long term that doesn't matter. Creativity has always been shared and copied and imitated and stolen, the only question is whether the creators get compensated (or even enriched) in the meantime. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but it happens regardless. There'll always be noncommercial posts by the billions of people who don't care if AI, or a search engine, or Twitter, or whoever, profits off them.
If we get anywhere remotely close to AGI, a lot of this won't matter. Our entire economic and legal systems will have to be redone. Maybe we can finally get rid of the capitalist and lawyer classes. Or they'll probably just further enslave the rest of us with the help of their robo-bros, giving AI more rights than poor people.
But either way, this is way bigger than the economics of 19th-century newspapers...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair#Plagiarism_and_fa...
"Here's how I would cure melanoma!" followed by your detailed findings. Zero mention of you.
F-that. Attribution, as best they can, is the least OpenAI can do as a service to humanity. It's a nod to all content creators that they have built their business off of.
Claiming knowledge without even acknowledging potential sources is gross. Solve it OpenAI.
If someone takes my software and uses it, cool. If they credit me, cool. If they don't, oh well. I'd still code.
Not everything needs to be ego driven. As long as the cancer researcher (and the future robots working alongside them) can make a living, I really don't think it matters whether they get credit outside their niches.
I have no idea who invented the CT scanner, Xray machines, the hyperdermic needle, etc. I don't really care. It doesn't really do me any good to associate Edison with light bulbs either, especially when LEDs are so much better now. I have no idea who designs the cars I drive. I go out of my way to avoid cults of personality like Tesla.
There's 8 billion of us. We all need to make a living. We don't need to be famous.
If someone chooses to dedicate their life to a particular domain - they sacrifice through hard work, they make hard-earned breakthroughs, then they get to dictate how their work will be utilized.
Sure, you can give it away. Your choice. Be anonymous. Your choice.
But you don't get to decide for them.
And their work certainly doesn't deserve to be stolen by an inhumane, non-acknowledging machine.