What do the creators of the original material owe? In January, a group of artists sued London-based Stability AI, a maker of image generation software, claiming that it was infringing their copyrights by using their work in training data and creating derivative works . Cartoonist Sarah Anderson, who is part of the lawsuit, told The New York Times she felt artists should choose to have their work included in such data and should be compensated for doing so. Getty Images is also suing Stability AI in the UK and the US for what it calls “brutal infringement” of millions of photos. Getty argued that the theft is particularly offensive because it has agreements to license data for machine learning. Stability AI has not yet responded to the complaints.
Does “fair use” apply? Copyrighted works can be used without permission for comment, criticism or other “transformative” purposes, and robots have traditionally been exempt from liability. But “courts won’t be as sympathetic to machine copying in the future,” Mark Lemley, the director of a Stanford Law School program that focuses on science and technology, wrote in the Texas Law Review with a former colleague, Bryan. Casey. Lemley is calling for a new fair learning standard for using copyrighted material in machine learning. It would include the question: What is the purpose of copying? If it’s just for learning, that might be allowed, but if the intent is to reproduce the work, that’s not the case. Not every machine learning dataset would qualify for the protection. New tools also raise questions about who is liable for infringement: the user operating the machine, the company that programmed the tool, or both?
Who owns the output of Generative AI? For now, only a human’s work can be copyrighted, but what about work that relies in part on generative AI? Some tool developers have said they will not claim copyright on content generated by their machines. In February, the Copyright Office rejected a copyright for AI-generated images in a graphic novel, though the author argued she created the images through “a creative, iterative process” that involved “composition, selection, arrangement, cropping, and editing for every image.” The government likened using the AI tool to hiring an artist But the lines may become blurred as the use of such tools becomes more common Like the tools, the intellectual property issues are a work in progress that can only will become more complex. — Efrat Livni
A new generation of chatbots
A brave new world. A new breed of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence has sparked a battle to determine whether the technology can turn the internet’s economics upside down, turning current powerhouses into has-beens and creating the industry’s next giants. These are the bots you should know about:
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Griffin Giving. Ken Griffin, the founder of hedge fund Citadel, donated $300 million to Harvard. It is his largest gift ever to his alma mater, which will rename the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in his honor, bringing his total donations to the school to nearly half a billion dollars. Not everyone was happy about it.
Withdrawal of the abortion pill. A Texas judge ruled that mifepristone, an abortion pill, should be removed from the shelves more than two decades after the Food and Drug Administration approved it. The Justice Department challenged the decision and the pharmaceutical industry condemned it, saying it could disrupt drug trade by retroactively changing rules and politicizing the approval process.
