The American Matthew Butterick has started a legal crusade against generative artificial intelligence (AI). In 2022, he filed the first lawsuit in the history of this field against Microsoft, one of the companies that develop these types of tools (GitHub Copilot). Today, he’s coordinating four class action lawsuits that bring together complaints filed by programmers, artists and writers.
If successful, he could force the companies responsible for applications such as ChatGPT or Midjourney to compensate thousands of creators. They may even have to retire their algorithms and retrain them with databases that don’t infringe on intellectual property rights.
I don’t see the US restricting AI development. No matter what is morally right or wrong, this is strategically important, and they won’t kneecap themselves in the global competition.
Strategically important how exactly?
Great power competition / military industrial complex . AI is a pretty vague term, but practically it could be used to describe drone swarming technology, cyber warfare, etc.
LLM-based chatbot and image generators are the types of “AI” that rely on stealing people’s intellectual property. I’m struggling to see how that applies to “drone swarming technology.” The only obvious use case is in the generation of propaganda.
You could use LLM like AI to go through vast amounts of combat data to make sense of it on the field and analyze data from mass surveillance. I doubt they need much more excuses.
Case could be made tech bros have overhyped the importance of AI to military industrial complex but it nevertheless has plenty of nasty uses.
The only obvious use case is in the generation of propaganda.
It is indeed. I would guess that’s the game, and is already happening.
If successful, he could force the companies responsible for applications such as ChatGPT or Midjourney to compensate thousands of creators. They may even have to retire their algorithms and retrain them with databases that don’t infringe on intellectual property rights.
They will readily agree to this after having made their money and use their ill gotten gains to train a new model. The rest of us will have to go pound sand as making a new model will have been made prohibitively expensive. Good intentions, but it will only help them by pulling up the ladder behind them.
It wouldn’t be pulling up the ladder behind them if we force them to step down that ladder and burn it by retraining their models from scratch “with databases that don’t infringe on intellectual property rights”.
I’m an artist and I can guarantee his lawsuits will accomplish jack squat for people like me. In fact, if successful, it will likely hurt artists trying to adapt to AI. Let’s be serious here, copyright doesn’t really protect artists, it’s a club for corporations to swing around to control our culture. AI isn’t the problem, capitalism is.
Maybe licensing comments isn’t that crazy, aye? 😉
Dumbass. YouTube has single-handedly proven how broken the copyright system is and this dick wants to make it worse. There needs to be a fair-er rebalancing of how people are compensated and for how long.
What exactly that looks like I’m not sure but I do know that upholding the current system is not the answer.
