The Media Research Center has long been hypocritical on the issue of private property, rejecting it when it involves things like right-wing meme-makers getting busted for violating copyright by using the work of others without permission. Now the MRC has another exemption for private property: artificial intelligence engines that make use of copyrighted work. Tom Olohan wrote in a July 3 post:
The legacy media are pushing artificial intelligence (AI) companies into so-called licensing agreements, allowing the left to control what Americans hear from chatbots. David Sacks, President Donald Trump’s AI czar, isn’t going to stand for it.
Sacks pushed back against lawsuits from authors targeting AI firms like Anthropic and Meta, noting how badly this will handicap American AI during the June 28 edition of the All-In podcast. Instead of embracing legacy media’s so-called licensing agreements with AI companies, Sacks made an excellent analogy that showed the importance of AI models being allowed to draw information from the widest variety of sources possible.
Sacks explained that what “AI models do in pre-training is they take millions of texts, millions of documents and they understand the positional relationship of the words and they translate that into math, into a vector space called positional encoding. That is a transformation of the underlying work. In the same way that a human can read a body of works and then come up with their own point of view, that is basically what AI models are doing.” [Emphasis added.]
Trump’s AI Czar went on to explain that AI companies like Anthropic and Meta need to be allowed to use as many sources as possible. Sacks said, “So, if AI models violate someone’s copyright by outputting something that’s identical, then, obviously, that’s a violation, but if all they’re doing is transforming the work, they’re doing positional encoding and then coming up with their own unique work product. This judge said that that is not a violation of copyright.”
Olohan then quoted his boss to demand that AI violate the copyrights of authors:
MRC Free Speech America Senior Counsel for Investigations Tim Kilcullen condemned these agreements, arguing, “Legacy media and Big Tech disguise their exclusivity contracts as ‘licensing’ agreements. This is because copyright law is a rare exception to the antitrust statutes that prohibit this type of anti-competitive misconduct. Judge Alsup’s ruling blows a hole in legacy media’s disingenuous argument by acknowledging that LLM development is the epitome of constitutionally-protected fair use.”
The choice by AI companies to use these companies to train their data, especially if paired with restrictions on what other data AI companies can use, means that chatbots will use biased information from sources like The Associated Press to respond to users. Recent MRC studies have shown that leftist bias is already a huge problem with AI models.
Yet neither Olohan nor Kilcullen cited an example of right-wing writers expressing permitting AI engines to train on their work, and they cited no example of “leftist bias” that can directly be traced to such copyright agreements.
It was Michael Morris’ turn to whine about the “copyright gambit” in an Aug. 12 post:
Debate over whether Big Tech AI companies should compensate legacy media outlets has picked up steam on the left. The question: Should tech giants be allowed, or even required, to pay for content they are feeding their AI algorithms, or is this another Big Media cartel gambit?
Coming on the heels of President Donald Trump’s executive actions in furtherance of his recently announced AI Action Plan, arguments from the left about protecting “content creators” are resoundingly similar to a measure the left has deployed before. Only this time, it appears to be much worse.
[…]With American society beginning to recognize and reject how the legacy media have failed to fairly and effectively cover the news, consumers are turning to new media sources like Big Tech aggregators and, even more recently, artificial intelligence chatbots.
And now the legacy media outlets and their tech giant partners have seemingly dispensed with any pretense of needing an exemption for anti-competitive practices altogether. Instead, the left appears to be arguing full-throatedly in favor of collusion in the form of contracts for content crawling as a way to prevent their imagined version of copyright infringement — and in some cases, perhaps even to induce Big Tech platforms to give preference to their content in AI responses while suppressing their competitors.
Like Olohan, Morris cited no evidence of these “new media sources” working with AI companies to make sure their biased content is included, and he offered no evidence to back up his claim that claims of copyright infringement are “imagined.” He then quoted one person, “tech entrepreneurs\” Jason Calacanis, whining about one agreement on a podcast:
Referencing a recent $20 million deal between Amazon AI and The New York Times, Calacanis argued that permitting AI companies to contract with legacy media outlets like The Times will give America a “distinct advantage”: It will “allow [legacy outlets like The Times] to hire more journalists,” and “fact checkers.” He continued, saying the quiet part out loud, “Then that protected site will have, be giving in real time, something these language models are going to have to go hack and steal. That real-time data is going to be a distinct advantage for Gemini, OpenAI, Amazon, whoever chooses to do it.”
Sacks then brought the issue home, calling out the left’s plan to bolster the legacy media at the expense of competition. “You have this crazy idea that we’re going to win the AI race by tying one hand behind our back so that you can subsidize journalists,” Sacks pointed out, “so you can subsidize The New York Times’s broken business model. It’s insane.”
Morris concluded with one more rant:
Sacks gets it. America can’t afford to march into the new digital era with a hand tied behind its back and with the legacy media receiving subsidies from their tech giant partners to force-feed the free world the left’s jaded, anti-American ideology. MRC will continue to ferret out purveyors of bias and viewpoint discrimination with data and facts that point to the truth.
Morris did not back up his assertion that all non-right-wing media content is “anti-American,” nor did he prove the purported American-ness of right-wing content. And he still offered no reason why right-wing media can’t set up the same agreements with AI firms that “legacy media” has — or why copyright issues are only an issue for the “left.”