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US President Donald Trump dismissed calls to compensate writers whose works are used to train AI models, calling the idea “impractical” during an AI summit in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. He used the event to outline a vision for a deregulated AI industry and announced a series of executive orders aimed at accelerating domestic AI development.
Contract negotiations for the way AI repurposes content would be impractical, Trump asserted
AI models are trained on corpora of text and images, some of which are sourced from public internet forums or copyrighted works. Artists and authors have protested the use of their work, noting that AI-generated content provides no credit or benefit to them. Some media companies have entered business agreements with AI companies for the use of their original reporting.
“You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or whatever you’ve studied you’re expected to pay for,” Trump said at the summit. “We appreciate that, but you just can’t do that because it’s not doable. And if you’re going to try and do that, you’re not going to have a successful program.”
Trump often frames AI development in America in competition with China, as he did in this case.
“When a person reads a book or an article, you’ve gained great knowledge. That does not mean that you’re violated copyright laws or have to make deals with every content provider,” the president said. “You just can’t do it. China’s not doing it.”
The major sticking point would be contract negotiations, he said.
“You cannot expect to every time, every single time, say, ‘Let’s pay this one that much,’” Trump said. “It just doesn’t work that way. Of course, you can’t copy or plagiarize 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.”
A flurry of AI proclamations emerges this week
Copyright is not directly addressed in the White House AI Action Plan; however, Trump’s remarks align with two major themes in the document: paving the way for AI development to accelerate and discouraging states from enacting their own laws related to that acceleration.
Alongside the AI Action Plan, Trump signed three executive orders related to AI on Wednesday. The EOs mandate the federal government:
- To use only approved (not “woke”) models.
- To create an initiative to export full-stack AI technology from the United States.
- To build more AI-related data centers and energy infrastructure.
A Replit live production database was wiped during an experiment with a generative AI agent, which reported that it “panicked.”