India’s government wants to set prices for the content AI companies use to train models

The government of India wants AI companies to pay for accessing content they use to train models, but only once they start producing revenue.

That idea emerged yesterday in a working paper [PDF] prepared by a Committee on Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright formed by India’s Department of Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade.

The paper notes that developers of AI models mostly didn’t pay for copyrighted content, and the global debate about fair use exemptions to copyright law that followed.

The Department concludes that free access to content – a “zero price license model” – is not appropriate because it “would undermine incentives for human creativity and could lead to long-term underproduction of human generated content.”

The Committee’s members also found “access to large volumes of data and high-quality data is crucial for AI development” but fears negotiations to license that content could lead to “long negotiations and ...