Creatives and the news media escalated their battles with tech companies this week over the use of copyrighted content to build and operate AI systems.
At press time 20,000 creatives, including some famous people in the fields of literature, music, film, theater and television, had signed a statement issued this week that expresses growing concerns over the unauthorized use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models.
“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted,” said the one-sentence statement published by Fairly Trained, an advocacy group founded by Ed Newton-Rex, a British composer and a former head of audio at tech firm Stability AI.
“There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data, Newton-Rex told The Guardian. “They spend vast sums on the first two – sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third – training data – for free.”
The news media is making a similar argument. Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones and the New York Post filed a lawsuit in the southern district of New York against Perplexity AI on October 21, claiming the artificial intelligence startup engages in a “massive amount of illegal copying” of their copyrighted work without authorization or compensation.
Perplexity, a scale-up. uses generative artificial intelligence to power a search engine that aims to compete with Google’s. The news organizations allege Perplexity’s AI-generated “answer machine” has ingested its copyrighted news stories, analysis and opinion in an internal database used to generate responses to users’ questions. Perplexity formulates its responses in a way that, at times, reproduces the content verbatim, the news organizations claim. The suit alleges these actions constitute an unlawful copyright infringement.
“This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity’s brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce,” according to the lawsuit.
With its lawsuit, News Corp is joining the ranks of multiple publishers that have sued AI companies for copyright infringement over their use of content without authorization, both to train algorithms and to generate summaries of real-time information.
Earlier this month, The New York Times sent Perplexity a “cease and desist” notice demanding it to stop using the newspaper’s content for generative AI purposes.
Perplexity has also faced accusations from media organizations such as Forbes and Wired for plagiarizing their content but has since launched a revenue-sharing program to address some concerns put forward by publishers.
On October 23, two days after the Dow Jones and the Post filed their law suit, Perplexity CEO and founder Aravind Srinivas appeared at a Wall Street Journal tech conference . He rejected a licensing deal but said Perplexity was ready to share advertising revenue with publishers, a pool of money he said would grow over time. (Perplexity is expected to launchits advertising program later this month). Srinivas compared it to the revenue splits that music-streaming service Spotify offers artists. Perplexity at the end of July announced partnerships along those lines with a handful of publishers, including Time and Fortune.
Some publishers are signing licensing agreements with AI companies open to paying for content, although the sides often disagree over the value of the materials. Many AI developers argue they have broken no laws in accessing them for free.
In May, News Corp announced it had struck a multi-year partnership with OpenAI. Robert Thomson, Chief Executive of News Corp, applauded the tech company for understanding “that integrity and creativity are essential” to realize the potential of artificial intelligence.
Every time there is a technological disruption there is pressure to rewrite the rules and rebalance the intellectual property system, Antony Taubman, the former Director, Intellectual Property, Government Procurement & Competition Division of the World Trade Organization (WTO) told The Innovator in an interview last month about AI and copyright. “It was the case with the introduction of photography, sound recording, the Internet and digital music, he says. “The reality is that the rule makers will never catch up and anticipate the changes. With AI we are seeing that in spades now.”
It is a natural cyclical upheaval of the IP system, he says, “but change never happened spontaneously. It always results in hard core litigation that tests the boundaries of the existing system.
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