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.
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/153216
As it should be.
Would you keep publishing articles if five people immediately stole the content and put it up on their site, claiming ownership of your research? Doubtful.
I'm sorry, but pretty much nobody does this. There is no "And these books are how I learned to write like this" after each text. There is no "Thank you Pitagoras!" after using the theorem. Generally you want sources, yes, but for verification and as a way to signal reliability.
Specifically academics and researchers do this, yes. Pretty much nobody else.
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.
Credit in academia is more the exception to the rule, and it's that cutthroat industry that needs a better, more cooperative system.
I have no idea who invented the CT scanner, Xray machines, the hyperdermic needle, etc. I don't really care.
Maybe you should care because those things didn’t fall out do the sky and someone sure as shit got paid to develop and build those things. You copy and pasted code is worth less, a CT scanner isn’t.
LLMs have, to my knowledge, made zero significant novel scientific discoveries. Much like crypto, they're a failure of technology to meaningfully move humanity forward; their only accomplishment is to parrot and remix information they've been trained on, which does have some interesting applications that have made Microsoft billions of dollars over the past 12 months, but let's drop the whole "they're going to save humanity and must be protected at any cost" charade. They're not AGI, and because no one has even a mote of dust of a clue as to what it will take to make AGI, its not remotely tenable to assert that they're even a stepping stone toward it.