Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) on Thursday called for the repeal of a law that provides tech platforms legal immunity from content hosted or created on their platforms, citing the danger of artificial intelligence.
Hawley called for the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act during a speech at the National Conservatism conference. He cited the big tech platform’s scraping of copyrighted works as one instance of big tech abuse.
He remarked, “The AI large language models [LLMs] have already trained on enough copyrighted works to fill the Library of Congress 22 times over. Let me just put a finer point on that — AI’s LLMs have ingested every published work in every language known to man already.”
“As I look out across the room and see many authors, all of your works have already been taken. Did they consult you? I doubt it. Did they compensate you? Of course not. This is wrong. This is dangerous,” Hawley, the former Missouri attorney general, said.
During the speech, he contended that there should be property rights assigned to certain types of data and legal liability for companies that use that data.
“Open the courtroom doors. Allow people to sue who had their rights taken away from them, including suing companies and actors and individuals who use AI,” he continued.
In July, Hawley said during a hearing that Meta “willfully” pirated “droves of copyrighted content” to train its artificial intelligence models.
Hawley said during a Judiciary Committee hearing about Meta’s alleged pirating of copyrighted material:
They knew exactly what they were doing. They pirated these materials willfully, as the idea of pirating and copyrighted works percolated through Meta, to take one example. Employee after employee warned management that what they were doing was illegal. One Meta employee told management and I quote now, “This is not trivial.” And she shared an article asking what is the probability of getting arrested for using torrents, illegal downloads, in the United States. Another Meta employee shared a different article saying that downloading from illegal repositories would open Meta up to legal ramifications.
“That’s a nice way of saying that what they were doing was exactly, totally, 100 percent barred by copyright law. Did Meta management listen? No. They bulldozed straight ahead,” he added.
Bestselling author David Baldacci weighed in, saying, “Every single one of my books was presented to me… in three seconds. It really felt like I had been robbed of everything of my entire adult life that I had worked on.”
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