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From VCRs to search engines, copyright court has long been a rite of passage for tech — and it’s one AI will face this year.
What happened: The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly using its stories to train AI models.
- Asking ChatGPT about current events can also generate unattributed, word-for-word excerpts from Times stories, which the paper says circumvents paywalls, referral links, and other revenue sources.
Catch-up: Last fall, a group of authors, including John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jonathan Franzen, sued OpenAI and Microsoft for training ChatGPT on their work, one of several similar suits filed last year.
- OpenAI has not commented on all of the cases but has argued that training AI on information scraped from the internet falls under fair use.
- A group of artists also have a pending class action against Stability AI and Midjourney, claiming the systems were trained to create art in their styles.
Why it matters: Any one of these lawsuits could shape the path forward for generative AI. Any legal burden would likely fall on the AI developers, but companies using generative AI may not like any resulting changes to what these systems are allowed to do.
- If a judge decides an AI model’s output violates copyright, it could be a simple fix, like getting a chatbot to summarize and link to a news story.
- But if training AI on copyrighted work is the problem, it could mean changing or even rebuilding some of the most widely used large language models.
Yes, but: Some have speculated that the Times lawsuit is a negotiating tactic for a licensing deal, which many news outlets are pursuing. That could be another solve for copyright issues, but it would further the gap AI leaders have in the market, as they are the only ones with the resources to pay out.
In Canada: Canada has its own copyright laws, but it’d be a huge burden for a company to train and maintain different models that are compliant with different rules in different countries. So if OpenAI or Midjourney make changes to avoid lawsuits in the U.S., expect to see them here, too.