Kettle Publishers and artists filed a slew of copyright lawsuits against the makers of text and image-generating AI systems last year. Now in 2024 and beyond, we're going to see how those play out, and what ramifications and settlements they bring.
The New York Times opened fire on OpenAI and its champion Microsoft just last week. The newspaper was upset that "millions" of its articles were used without permission to build bots like ChatGPT that output "memorized" copies of those stories or ones that are "substantially similar."
Your humble hacks got together today to discuss it all, which you can replay below – or listen via your favorite podcast distributor: RSS and MP3, Apple, Amazon, Spotify, and Google.
On the surface, it's all about alleged copyright infringement by Big Tech at a time when it's still up in the air as to how copyright law intersects generative models. To us, what it really boils down to – and what the publishers and artists involved may struggle to litigate over - is a moral issue: this is the future of human labor versus an endless army of machines.
Do the plaintiffs have a solid footing in terms of copyright law; does that law need to change; and why should it change? Is this really about infringement, or about a right to earn a living from making content, and about not having to compete against hyperscale generators of material that are trained on your creativity in the first place?
Meanwhile, a Beijing court has ruled AI-generated content can be copyright protected. America has taken a similar stance: if a human was the driving force of the creative work, and they happened to use AI to produce it, it can be protected by copyright.
On today's 18-minute show we have, clockwise from top left in the thumbnail, vultures Chris Williams, Brandon Vigliarolo, Thomas Claburn, and host Iain Thomson.
This episode was produced and edited by Nicole Hemsoth Prickett. You can find previous Kettles right here. ®
Source: The register