#HelloWorld. Spring has sprung. While the EU AI Act receives wall-to-wall coverage in other outlets, this issue highlights recent rules, warnings, and legislative enactments here in the U.S. And it ends on a personal, meditative note from an AI user, worth a read. Let’s stay smart together. (Subscribe to the mailing list to receive future issues.)
#HelloWorld. Much to catch up on from February and the first half of March. In this issue, we cover the latest AI activity from Europe, as well as a bevy of guidance and updates from U.S. agencies. Off to the races. Let’s stay smart together. (Subscribe to the mailing list to receive future issues.)
#HelloWorld. January has not been especially frantic on the legal-developments-in-AI front. Yes, we know the anticipated final text of the EU AI Act was published unofficially, but the final vote hasn’t happened yet, so we’re biding time for now. Meanwhile, in this issue, we check in with state bar associations, SAG-AFTRA, and the FTC. They have things to say about AI policy too, so we’ll listen. Let’s stay smart together. (Subscribe to the mailing list to receive future issues.)
#HelloWorld. It’s 2024 and we… are…back. Lots to catch up on. AI legal developments worldwide show no signs of letting up, so here’s our New Year’s resolution: We’re redoubling efforts to serve concise, focused guidance of immediate use to the legal and business community. Let’s stay smart together. (Subscribe to the mailing list to receive future issues.)
#HelloWorld. The days are now shorter, but this issue is longer. President Biden’s October 30th Executive Order deserves no less. Plus, the UK AI Safety Summit warrants a drop-by, and three copyright and right-to-publicity theories come under a judicial microscope. Read on to catch up. Let’s stay smart together. (Subscribe to the mailing list to receive future issues.)
#HelloWorld. October swirls with AI headlines, but one senses a running-to-stand-still quality. Like the opening moves in a chess game, players continue to arrange regulatory and litigation pieces on the board, but the first true clash still awaits. Let’s stay smart together. (Subscribe to the mailing list to receive future issues.)
#HelloWorld. Fall begins, and the Writers Guild strike ends. In this issue, we look at what that means for AI in Hollywood. We also run through a dizzying series of self-regulating steps AI tech players have undertaken. As the smell of pumpkin spice fills the air, let’s stay smart together. (Subscribe to the mailing list to receive future issues.)
AI and the Writers Guild. Screenwriters ended a nearly five-month strike with a tentative new agreement good through mid-2026. The Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA) includes multiple AI-centric provisions. The AI-related highlights: Continue reading “The AI Update | October 5, 2023”
#HelloWorld. In the midst of summer, the pace of significant AI legal and regulatory news has mercifully slackened. With room to breathe, this issue points the lens in a different direction, at some of our persistent AI-related obsessions and recurrent themes. Let’s stay smart together. (Subscribe to the mailing list to receive future issues.)
Stanford is on top of the foundation model evaluation game. Dedicated readers may have picked up on our love of the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models. The Center’s 2021 paper, “On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models,” is long, but it coined the term “foundation models” to cover the new transformer LLM and diffusion image generator architectures dominating the headlines. The paper exhaustively examines these models’ capabilities; underlying technologies; applications in medicine, law, and education; and potential social impacts. In a downpour of hype and speculation, the Center’s empirical, fact-forward thinking provides welcome shelter.
Now, like techno-Britney Spears, the Center has done it again. (The AI Update’s human writers can, like LLMs, generate dad jokes.) With the European Parliament’s mid-June adoption of the EU AI Act (setting the stage for further negotiation), researchers at the Center asked this question: To what extent would the current LLM and image-generation models be compliant with the EU AI Act’s proposed regulatory rules for foundation models, mainly set out in Article 28? The answer: None right now. But open-source start-up Hugging Face’s BLOOM model ranked highest under the Center’s scoring system, getting 36 out of 48 total possible points. The scores of Google’s PaLM 2, OpenAI’s GPT-4, Stability.ai’s Stable Diffusion, and Meta’s LLaMA models, in contrast, all hovered in the 20s.
#HelloWorld. Regulatory hearings and debates were less prominent these past two weeks, so in this issue we turn to a potpourri of private AI industry developments. The Authors Guild releases new model contract clauses limiting generative AI uses; big tech companies provide AI customers with a series of promises and tips, at varying levels of abstraction; and the Section 230 safe harbor is ready for its spotlight. Plus, ChatGPT is no barrel of laughs—actually, same barrel, same laughs. Let’s stay smart together. (Subscribe to the mailing list to receive future issues.)
The Authors Guild adds new model clauses. Back in March, the Authors Guild recommended that authors insert a new model clause in their contracts with publishers prohibiting use of the authors’ work for “training artificial intelligence to generate text.” Platforms and publishers have increasingly seen this language pop up in their negotiations with authors. Now the Authors Guild is at it again. On June 1, the organization announced four new model clauses that would require an author to disclose that a manuscript includes AI-generated text; place limits (to be specified in negotiation) on the amount of synthetic text that an author’s manuscript can include; prohibit publishers from using AI narrators for audio books, absent the author’s consent; and proscribe publishers from employing AI to generate translations, book covers, or interior art, again absent consent.
#HelloWorld. In this issue, we head to Capitol Hill and summarize key takeaways from May’s Senate and House Judiciary subcommittee hearings on generative AI. We also visit California, to check in on the Writers Guild strike, and drop in on an online fan fiction community, the Omegaverse, to better understand the vast number of online data sources used in LLM training. Let’s stay smart together. (Subscribe to the mailing list to receive future issues.)
Printing press, atomic bomb—or something else? On consecutive days in mid-May, both Senate and House Judiciary subcommittees held the first of what they promised would be a series of hearings on generative AI regulation. The Senate session (full video here) focused on AI oversight more broadly, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s earnest testimony capturing many a headline. The House proceeding (full video here) zeroed in on copyright issues—the “interoperability of AI and copyright law.”
We watched all five-plus hours of testimony so you don’t have to. Here are the core takeaways from the sessions: Continue reading “The AI Update | May 31, 2023”
