Chris Lehane is one of the best in the business at making bad news disappear. Al Gore’s press secretary during the Clinton years, Airbnb’s chief crisis manager through every regulatory nightmare from here to Brussels – Lehane knows how to spin. Now he’s two years into what might be his most impossible gig yet: as OpenAI’s VP of global policy, his job is to convince the world that OpenAI genuinely gives a damn about democratizing artificial intelligence while the company increasingly behaves like, well, every other tech giant that’s ever claimed to be different.
I had 20 minutes with him on stage at the Elevate conference in Toronto earlier this week – 20 minutes to get past the talking points and into the real contradictions eating away at OpenAI’s carefully constructed image. It wasn’t easy or entirely successful. Lehane is genuinely good at his job. He’s likable. He sounds reasonable. He admits uncertainty. He even talks about waking up at 3 a.m. worried about whether any of this will actually benefit humanity.
But good intentions don’t mean much when your company is subpoenaing critics, draining economically depressed towns of water and electricity, and bringing dead celebrities back to life to assert your market dominance.
The company’s Sora problem is really at the root of everything else. The video generation tool launched last week with copyrighted material seemingly baked right into it. It was a bold move for a company already getting sued by the New York Times, the Toronto Star, and half the publishing industry. From a business and marketing standpoint, it was also brilliant. The invite-only app soared to the top of the App Store as people created digital versions of themselves, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; characters like Pikachu and Cartman of “South Park”; and dead celebrities like Tupac Shakur.
Asked what drove OpenAI’s decision to launch this newest version of Sora with these characters, Lehane offered that Sora is a “general purpose technology” like the printing press, democratizing creativity for people without talent or resources. Even he – a self-described creative zero – can make videos now, he said on stage.
What he danced around is that OpenAI initially “let” rights holders opt out of having their work used to train Sora, which is not how copyright use typically works. Then, after OpenAI noticed that people really liked using copyrighted images, it “evolved” toward an opt-in model. That’s not iterating. That’s testing how much you can get away with. (By the way, though the Motion Picture Association made some noise last week about legal threats, OpenAI appears to have gotten away with quite a lot.)
Naturally, the situation brings to mind the aggravation of publishers who accuse OpenAI of training on their work without sharing the financial spoils. When I pressed Lehane about publishers getting cut out of the economics, he invoked fair use, that American legal doctrine that’s supposed to balance creator rights against public access to knowledge. He called it the secret weapon of U.S. tech dominance.
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Maybe. But I’d recently interviewed Al Gore – Lehane’s old boss – and realized anyone could simply ask ChatGPT about it instead of reading my piece on TechCrunch. “It’s ‘iterative’,” I said, “but it’s also a replacement.”
Lehane listened and dropped his spiel. “We’re all going to need to figure this out,” he said. “It’s really glib and easy to sit here on stage and say we need to figure out new economic revenue models. But I think we will.” (We’re making it up as we go, is what I heard.)
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