Technology

Creating material that is copyright infridgement is not a desired output

Agreed.

the purpose of guns is to kill (when used).

Guns is a term with varied definitions of which not all are intended to kill. There are rubber bullets, air soft, small caliber, and even paint ball guns. These MAY be lethal but were made with other goals in mind.

Nvidia on the other hand made GPUs for applications that revolve around video, the G literally stands for graphics. Some people found out that they are also efficient at other tasks so Nvidia made a new line of products for that workload because it was more lucrative. Gamers usually only buy 1 graphics card per machine, a few years ago some would even buy up to 3. In contrast, AI researchers/architects/programmers buy as many as they can afford and constantly buy more. This has made Nvidia change their product stack to cater to the more lucrative customer.

AI manufacturers depend on copyrighted material to "train" the AI

With everything I said, these AI creators CHOOSE what to feed into these new tools. They can choose to input things in the public domain or even paid-licensed-content but instead using copyrighted and pirated content is the norm. That is because this is a new field and we are collectively learning where the boundaries are and what is considered acceptable and legal.

Reddit recently signed a deal to license it's data (user generated content like posts and comments) for use with AI generation. Other companies are using internal data to tailor their AIs to solve field-specific problems. The problem is that AI, just like guns, is a broad term.

the method of creation makes it more likely to infridge.

Nvidia has given us the tools but until we define what is considered acceptable, these kinds of things will be inevitable. I do believe that the authors had their copyrights infringed but they are also going after the wrong people. There have been reports of AI spitting out full books on command, clearly proving that those works were used to train. The authors should be going after the creators of those specific AIs, not Nvidia.

There is a long and bumpy road ahead.

No offense, but the article is not about Nvidia GPUs, but their own AI model NeMo. Literally in the first line of the report. In this case, they definitely have the say on what training data to be used in the model.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/27/gun-lawsuits-manufacturer-sellers-crimes

"That led to the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which effectively granted gun manufacturers and sellers immunity from lawsuits related to harm “resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse” of guns.

Unlike other industries, the gun industry was now largely free to act as it chose."