A.I. GETS CHALLENGED LEGALLY

IT WAS INEVITABLE: A MAJOR NEWS ORGANIZATION suing a purveyor of Artificial Intelligence. Indeed, there are multiple layers in this, given that SimanaitisSays gleans information about this matter from one of the parties in the suit by means that are not all that dissimilar to the other party’s method of operation.

Image by Sasha Maslov for The New York Times.

In December 27, 2023, Michael M. Grynbaum and Ryan Mac wrote, “The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.”

Grynbaum and Mac continued, “The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.”

Image from Wisecube.

Large Language Model Background. As generally understood these days, Large Language Models function by electronically scooping up data from the Internet and elsewhere and then applying LLM algorithms to generate A.I. responses. Loosely, given “Was this the face that ….,” an LLM would likely continue with “launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Illium?” 

Marlowe’s Faustus, c. 1592, never was copyrighted and no one seems to care—unless, for example, if the original A.I. query had to do with the subject of facial recognition and the LLM erroneously responded with this Marlowe quote, thus generating something of an A.I. “hallucination.”

The A.I. Quandary. Grynbaum and Mac say, “Concerns about the uncompensated use of intellectual property by A.I. systems have coursed through creative industries, given the technology’s ability to mimic natural language and generate sophisticated written responses to virtually any prompt.”

They cite other lawsuits: “The actress Sarah Silverman joined a pair of lawsuits in July that accused Meta and OpenAI of having ‘ingested’ her memoir as a training text for A.I. programs. Novelists expressed alarm when it was revealed that A.I. systems had absorbed tens of thousands of books, leading to a lawsuit by authors including Jonathan Franzen and John Grisham. Getty Images, the photography syndicate, sued one A.I. company that generates images based on written prompts, saying the platform relies on unauthorized use of Getty’s copyrighted visual materials.”

Other examples are in A.I.-generated voice and visual syntheses. As AP noted concerning the recently settled SAG-AFTRA strike, “In Hollywood Writers’ Battle Against A.I., Humans Win (For Now).”

A Microsoft Response.  Grynbaum and Mac note, “Microsoft has previously acknowledged potential copyright concerns over its A.I. products. In September, the company announced that if customers using its A.I. tools were hit with copyright complaints, it would indemnify them and cover the associated legal costs.”

I can hardly address legal aspects of this, but it smacks of belatedly closing the barn door. 

The Money Angle. Needless to say, there are financial as well as creative implications in all this. Grynbaum and Mac describe, “In one example of how A.I. systems use The Times’s material, the suit showed that Browse With Bing, a Microsoft search feature powered by ChatGPT, reproduced almost verbatim results from Wirecutter, The Times’s product review site. The text results from Bing, however, did not link to the Wirecutter article, and they stripped away the referral links in the text that Wirecutter uses to generate commissions from sales based on its recommendations.”

Other A.I. Guardrails. Grynbaum and Mac write, “Some news outlets have already reached agreements for the use of their journalism: The Associated Press struck a licensing deal in July with OpenAI, and Axel Springer, the German publisher that owns Politico and Business Insider, did likewise this month. Terms for those agreements were not disclosed.”

Both of these agreements (and, alas, the strikes and lawsuits as well) are welcomed starts. Time is crucial, though: How long before real culprits transform LLM’s potential benefits into electronic skullduggery? ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024