by The future of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence products that wouldn’t be so eloquent if they didn’t embody a vast array of copyrighted human works will be tested by a barrage of high-profile lawsuits in a New York federal court.
But are AI chatbots—in this case, widely commercialized products made by OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft—violating copyright and fair competition laws? Professional writers and media outlets will have an uphill battle to win that argument in court.
“I want to be optimistic for the authors, but I’m not. I think they have an uphill battle here,” said copyright attorney Ashima Aggarwal, who used to work for academic publishing giant John Wiley & Sons.
One lawsuit comes from the New York Times. Another from a group of well-known novelists such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George RR Martin. The third from a best-selling nonfiction writer, including the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on which the hit movie “Oppenheimer” was based.
THE DUTIES
Each of the lawsuits makes different allegations, but all point to the San Francisco-based OpenAI company “building this product on the backs of other people’s intellectual property,” said attorney Justin Nelson, who is represented the non-fiction writers and his law firm. also representing the Times.
“What OpenAI is saying is that they’ve had a free ride to literally take anybody else’s intellectual property since the beginning of time, as long as it’s on the internet,” Nelson said.
The Times sued in December, arguing that ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot are competing with the same outlets they train and diverting web traffic from the newspaper and other copyright holders who depend on advertising revenue generated from their -content to continue producing their journalism. He also provided evidence that the chatbots were quoting the Times articles verbatim. At other times the chatbots attributed incorrect information to the paper in a way they said damaged its reputation.
One senior federal judge has presided over all three cases so far, as well as a fourth from two other non-fiction authors who filed another lawsuit last week. US District Judge Sidney H. Stein has been at the Manhattan-based court since 1995 when he was nominated by then-President Bill Clinton.
THE ANSWER
OpenAI and Microsoft have not yet filed formal counterarguments to the New York cases, but OpenAI made a public statement this week describing the Times’ lawsuit as “without merit” and saying the chatbot’s ability to regurgitate some articles was word “rare. bug.”
“Training AI models using publicly available internet materials is a fair use, as longstanding precedents support,” said a Monday blog post from the company. He went on to suggest that the Times “instructed the model to revive or pick their examples from many attempts.”
OpenAI cited licensing agreements made last year with The Associated Press, German media company Axel Springer and other organizations as agreements that showed how the company wants to support a healthy news ecosystem. OpenAI is paying an undisclosed fee to license AP’s archive of news stories. The New York Times was in similar discussions before deciding to sue.
OpenAI said earlier this year that access to AP’s “high-quality factual text archive” would improve the capabilities of its AI system. But his blog post this week downplayed the importance of news content for AI training, arguing that large language models learn from “vast aggregates of human knowledge” and that “no single source of data — including The New York Times – significant to the public. intended learning of the model.”
WHO IS FORMING IT?
Much of the AI industry’s argument hinges on the “fair use” doctrine of US copyright law that allows limited uses of copyrighted materials, such as for teaching, research or changing a copyrighted work into something different.
So far, the courts have largely sided with tech companies in interpreting how copyright laws should deal with AI systems. In a victory for the visual artists, a federal judge in San Francisco last year dismissed much of the first lawsuit against AI image generators, although he allowed some of the case to proceed. Another judge from California shot down comedian Sarah Silverman’s arguments that Facebook’s Meta textual parent violated her memories to build its AI model.
Subsequent cases filed over the past year have provided more detailed evidence, but Aggarwal said regarding the use of copyrighted material to train AI systems that deliver “a small portion of that to users, the courts don’t seem willing to do that . copyright infringement.”
Most tech companies point to Google’s success in overcoming legal challenges to its online book library as precedent. The US Supreme Court in 2016 upheld lower court rulings that rejected the authors’ claim that Google’s digitization of millions of books and showing snippets of them to the public constituted copyright infringement.
But judges interpret fair use arguments on a case-by-case basis and it’s “very fact-dependent,” depending on economic impact and other factors, said Cathy Wolfe, an executive at the Dutch firm Wolters Kluwer who sits on the organization. too. board of the Copyright Clearance Center, which helps negotiate print and digital media licenses in the US
“Just because something is free on the internet, on a website, doesn’t mean you can copy it and email it, let alone use it to do commercial business,” Wolfe said. “I don’t know who’s going to win, but I’m definitely an advocate for copyright protection for all of us. It drives innovation.”
OVER THE COURTS
Some media outlets and other content creators are looking beyond the courts and asking lawmakers or the US Copyright Office to strengthen copyright protections for the AI era. A US Senate Judiciary Committee panel will hear testimony Wednesday from media executives and advocates at a hearing dedicated to the effect of AI on journalism.
Roger Lynch, chief executive of the Conde Nast magazine chain, plans to tell senators that AI generation companies are “using our stolen intellectual property to build replacement tools.”
“We believe that a legislative fix can be simple — clarifying that using copyrighted material in conjunction with commercial Gen AI is inappropriate and requires a license,” says a copy of Lynch’s prepared remarks.
