Slashdot reader rtfa0987 spotted this on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. “Silicon Valley is poised once again to cash in on other people’s products, making a data grab of unprecedented scale that has already spawned lawsuits and congressional hearings.
Chatbots and other forms of generative artificial intelligence that burst onto the technology scene in recent months are fed vast amounts of material scraped from the internet — books, screenplays, research papers, news stories, photos, art, music, code and more — to produce answers, imagery or sound in response to user prompts… But a thorny, contentious and highly consequential issue has arisen: A great deal of the bots’ fodder is copyrighted property…
The new AI’s intellectual-property problem goes beyond art into movies and television, photography, music, news media and computer coding. Critics worry that major players in tech, by inserting themselves between producers and consumers in commercial marketplaces, will suck out the money and remove financial incentives for producing TV scripts, artworks, books, movies, music, photography, news coverage and innovative software. “It could be catastrophic,” said Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, which represents nearly 2,000 U.S. news publishers, including this news organization. “It could decimate our industry.”
The new technology, as happened with other Silicon Valley innovations, including internet-search, social media and food delivery, is catching on among consumers and businesses so quickly that it may become entrenched — and beloved by users — long before regulators and lawmakers gather the knowledge and political will to impose restraints and mitigate harms. “We may need legislation,” said Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, who as a member of the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on copyright and generative AI last month. “Content creators have rights and we need to figure out a way how those rights will be respected….”
Furor over the content grabbing is surging. Photo-sales giant Getty is also suing Stability AI. Striking Hollywood screenwriters last month raised concerns that movie studios will start using chatbot-written scripts fed on writers’ earlier work. The record industry has lodged a complaint with federal authorities over copyrighted music being used to train AI.
The article includes some unique perspectives:
- There’s a technical solution being proposed by the software engineer-CEO of Dazzle Labs, a startup building a platform for controlling personal data. The Mercury News summarizes it as “content producers could annotate their work with conditions for use that would have to be followed by companies crawling the web for AI fodder.”
- Santa Clara University law school professor Eric Goldman “believes the law favors use of copyrighted material for training generative AI. ‘All works build upon precedent works. We are all free to take pieces of precedent works. What generative AI does is accelerate that process, but it’s the same process. It’s all part of an evolution of our society’s storehouse of knowledge….”
