Funny how some things slip through the cracks until you notice them only much later… Apparently I was directly referenced in Sam Altman’s Questions for the Record, which were written responses following his US Senate testimony, dated here June 22, 2023. I’ll excerpt the whole section:

[QUESTION]

1. Training data is crucial to foundational models like GPT-4, where content such as news, art, music, and research papers are used to create and refine AI systems, largely material aggregated from the internet. This content represents the labor, livelihoods, and careers of artists, experts, journalists, and scientists. How should we make sure AI systems respect, acknowledge, and compensate the labor of individuals whose work is used to train AI models?

[REPLY]

Ensuring that the creator economy continues to be vibrant is an important priority for OpenAI. Writers, artists, composers and other creators have contributed immeasurably to societies throughout the history of civilization, and they are a vital part of American society and the American economy today. OpenAI is actively engaged in discussions with a wide variety of creators and content owners, geared toward finding mutually beneficial opportunities for creators and technology providers. Those discussions include a recognition by all parties that the technology is still in a nascent stage, and many creators continue to experiment with AI tools to assist in their creation of new works. A few examples:

Karen Cheng, an artist who uses OpenAI’s image generation tool to prompt the AI system to generate creative imagery overlaid to the rhythm of music in the background, created this DALL-E “music video.

Tim Boucher, a science fiction writer, has used a combination of AI tools to write a series of books in a volume driven format that previously would not have been possible.

Paul McCartney is using AI to create a final Beatles album.

Well, I’m at least impressed here that I upstaged McCartney somehow. And I appreciate this phrasing of a “volume driven format” instead of the less friendly “cheap book content” phrase included in the authors’ lawsuit against Anthropic.

However, I can confirm that when they say, “OpenAI is actively engaged in discussions with a wide variety of creators,” that so far I have not been one of them. I wouldn’t mind being one, though, I suppose. I am literally using their products at least a dozen times per day… If you’re reading, shoot me an email!

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