What do you owe the creators of the original material? In January, a group of artists sued London-based Stability AI, maker of image-generating software, claiming it had infringed copyright by using their work to train data and create derivative works. Cartoonist Sarah Anderson, who is participating in the lawsuit, told The New York Times that she believes artists should choose to include their work in such data and should be compensated for it. Getty Images is also suing Stability AI in the UK and US for “brazen infringement” of millions of photos. Getty claimed the theft was particularly offensive because it has a deal to license the data for machine learning. Stability AI has not responded to complaints yet.
Does “fair use” apply? Copyrighted works can be used without permission for commenting, criticism, or other “transforming” purposes, and robots have traditionally been exempt from liability. It won’t be favorable,” Mark Remley, director of the Stanford Law School program focused on science and technology, writes with former colleague Brian Casey in the Texas Law Review. Lemley calls for a new “fair learning” standard for using copyrighted material in machine learning. These include questions such as: What is the purpose of the copying? It may be acceptable for the purpose of learning, but not for the purpose of reproducing the work. Not all machine learning data sets are eligible for protection. The new tool also raises the question of who is responsible for infringement — is it the user who gave the instructions to the machine, the company that programmed the tool, or both?
Who owns the output of generative AI? Right now, only human works can be copyrighted, but what about works that partially rely on generative AI? Some tool developers have stated that they do not claim copyright on their machine-generated content. In February, the Copyright Office denied copyrighting the AI-generated images in the graphic novel, but the writers said it was a “creative and iterative process” involving composing, selecting, arranging, cropping, and editing. The image was created through each image. The government compared the use of AI tools to hiring artists. But as the use of such tools becomes more common, the lines can blur. As with tools, intellectual property issues are a work in progress and will only get more complicated. — Efrat Livni
A new generation of chatbots
Brave New World. New chatbots powered by artificial intelligence have ignited a scramble to determine whether this technology can overturn the economics of the internet, turning today’s powerhouses into the past and the industry’s next giants. The bots you should know about are:
in case you missed
Griffin Giving. Ken Griffin, founder of hedge fund Citadel, donated $300 million to Harvard University. His alma mater renamed the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in his honor, and his total donation to the school is about $500 million. Not everyone was happy about it.
Abortion drug pullback. A judge in Texas has ruled that mifepristone, an abortion drug that has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for more than 20 years, should be removed from the shelves. The Justice Department challenged the decision, denouncing it and saying it could turn the business of drug manufacturing upside down by retroactively changing regulations and politicizing the approval process.
