Ex-Google CEO Says It's Fine If AI Companies "Stole All the Content"

"If it took off, then you'd hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right?"

Move Fast and Steal Things

Worried your AI startup might be illegally swallowing up boatloads of copyright-protected content? According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, you can worry about that later — once you have oodles of cash and a platoon of lawyers, that is.

As caught by The Verge, during a recent talk at Stanford's School of Engineering, Schmidt displayed what can only be described as Silicon Valley CEO Final Boss Energy as he laid out a theoretical scenario in which the students in the room might use a large language model (LLM) to build a TikTok competitor, in the case that the platform was to be banned.

Schmidt acknowledged that his imagined scenario might be riddled with legal and ethical questions — but that, he says, should be something to deal with later.

"Here's what I propose each and every one of you do. Say to your LLM the following: 'Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it's not viral, do something different along the same lines," Schmidt told the room. "That's the command."

And "what you would do if you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur," he continued, "is if it took off, then you'd hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean the mess up, right?" He then added that "if nobody uses your product, it doesn't matter that you stole all the content" anyway.

"Do not quote me," the billionaire continued. (Oops!)

Lawyers With Mops

Schmidt did at one point try to point out that he "was not arguing that you should illegally steal everybody's music," despite advising the students moments earlier to essentially do exactly that.

In many ways, the ex-Google CEO's statement perfectly encapsulates much of the AI industry's overarching attitude toward other people's stuff.

Companies have been scraping up human-produced content for years now to train their ever-hungry AI models. And while some entities, like The New York Times, are calling copyright foul, Schmidt apparently sees alleged IP theft as a "mess" for lawyers to clean up later.

"Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess," Schmidt told the Stanford students, according to a transcript of the event. "And that's typically how those things are done."

The video has since been taken down after plenty of negative press coverage.

More on AI and copyright: Microsoft CEO of AI Says It's Fine to Steal Anything on the Open Web