VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA - 

This article has been adapted from the original version, which can be found on Gary Marcus' Substack.

What does one do when one’s potentially zillion-dollar business suddenly runs into a massive obstacle that turns out bigger than expected?

For many companies, the first resort is to stonewall. If a major incident goes down, a simple ‘no comment’ is a time-honored classic - ducking reporters altogether is even better. When a Business Insider reporter asked OpenAI and Midjourney to comment on the Gary Marcus-Reid Southen results showing the potential for inadvertent plagiarism in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) - even with simple prompts that were not asking for infringing content - OpenAI and Midjourney both chose the second option:

Stonewalling is rarely a viable long-term solution, however. This is why one must also lobby both the public and government. OpenAI recently made its case to the United Kingdom government, per a scoop in the Daily Telegraph - sent to me from the UK by Cardiff University Business School Prof Leighton Andrews.

This is worth reading carefully to see what lies ahead - and there are plenty of lies ahead:

Frankly, this is nothing more than self-serving nonsense. My snarky reply on X (née Twitter) - which instantly went viral - was: