#HelloWorld. Copyright suits are as unrelenting as the summer heat, with no relief in the forecast. AI creators are working on voluntary commitments to watermark synthetic content. And meanwhile, is ChatGPT getting “stupider”? Lots to explore. Let’s stay smart together. (Subscribe to the mailing list to receive future issues).
Big names portend big lawsuits. Since ChatGPT’s public launch in November 2022, plaintiffs have filed eight major cases in federal court—mostly in tech-centric Northern California—accusing large language models and image generators of copyright infringement, Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations, unfair competition, statutory and common law privacy violations, and other assorted civil torts. (Fancy a summary spreadsheet? Drop us a line.)
Here comes another steak for the grill: This month, on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” IAC’s chairman Barry Diller previewed that “leading publishers” were constructing copyright cases against generative AI tech companies, viewing it as a lynchpin for arriving at a viable business model: “yes, we have to do it. It’s not antagonistic. It’s to stake a firm place in the ground to say that you cannot ingest our material without figuring out a business model for the future.” Semafor later reported that The New York Times, News Corp., and Axel Springer were all among this group of likely publishing company plaintiffs, worried about the loss of website traffic that would come from generative AI answers replacing search engine results and looking for “billions, not millions, from AI.”
Continue reading “The AI Update | July 27, 2023”