Character.AI Confirms Mass Deletion of Fandom Characters, Says They're Not Coming Back; Futurism, November 27, 2024

 MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ , Futurism; Character.AI Confirms Mass Deletion of Fandom Characters, Says They're Not Coming Back

"The embattled AI companion company Character.AI confirmed to Futurism that it removed a large number of characters from its platform, citing its adherence to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) and copyright law, but failing to say whether the deletions were proactive or in response to requests from the holders of the characters' intellectual property rights...

That's not surprising: Character.AI is currently facing a lawsuit brought by the family of a 14-year-old teenager in Florida who died by suicide after forming an intense relationship with a Daenerys Targaryen chatbot on its platform...

It's been a bad few months for Character.AI. In October, shortly before the recent lawsuit was filed, it was revealed that someone had created a chatbot based on a murdered teenager without consent from the slain teen's family. (The character was removed and Character.AI apologized, as AdWeek first reported.) And in recent weeks, we've reported on disturbing hordes of suicide, pedophilia, and eating disorder-themed chatbots hosted by the platform, all of which were freely accessible to Character.AI users of all ages."

To Whom Does the World Belong? The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT.; Boston Review, December 10, 2024

  Alexander Hartley, Boston Review; To Whom Does the World Belong? The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT

"Who, if anyone, owns the copyright to a paragraph produced by a chatbot? As I write, nobody knows."

Google CEO: AI development is finally slowing down—‘the low-hanging fruit is gone’; CNBC, December 8, 2024

Megan Sauer , CNBC; Google CEO: AI development is finally slowing down—‘the low-hanging fruit is gone’;

"Now, with the industry’s competitive landscape somewhat established — multiple big tech companies, including Google, have competing models — it’ll take time for another technological breakthrough to shock the AI industry into hyper-speed development again, Pichai said at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit last week.

“I think the progress is going to get harder. When I look at [2025], the low-hanging fruit is gone,” said Pichai, adding: “The hill is steeper ... You’re definitely going to need deeper breakthroughs as we get to the next stage.”...

Some tech CEOs, like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, agree with Pichai. “Seventy years of the Industrial Revolution, there wasn’t much industry growth, and then it took off ... it’s never going to be linear,” Nadella saidat the Fast Company Innovation Festival 2024 in October.

Others disagree, at least publicly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example, posted “there is no wall” on social media platform X in November — a response to reports that the recently released ChatGPT-4 was only moderately better than previous models."

In Wisconsin, Professors Worry AI Could Replace Them; Inside Higher Ed, December 6, 2024

 Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed; In Wisconsin, Professors Worry AI Could Replace Them

"Faculty at the cash-strapped Universities of Wisconsin System are pushing back against a proposed copyright policy they believe would cheapen the relationship between students and their professors and potentially allow artificial intelligence bots to replace faculty members...

The policy proposal is not yet final and is open for public comment through Dec. 13. ..

Natalia Taft, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside who signed the open letter, told Inside Higher Ed that she believes the policy proposal “is part of the trend of the corporatization of academia.”...

Jane Ginsburg, a professor of literary and artistic property law at Columbia University School of Law, said the university has the law on its side. 

Under the 1976 Copyright Act, “course material prepared by employees, including professors, as part of their jobs comes within the definition of a ‘work made for hire,’ whose copyright vests initially in the employer (the University), not the employee (the professor).”"

The Copyrighted Material Being Used to Train AI; The Bulwark, December 7, 2024

 SONNY BUNCH, The Bulwark; The Copyrighted Material Being Used to Train AI

"On this week’s episode, I talked to Alex Reisner about his pieces in the Atlantic highlighting the copyrighted material being hoovered into large language models to help AI chatbots simulate human speech. If you’re a screenwriter and would like to see which of your work has been appropriated to aid in the effort, click here; he has assembled a searchable database of nearly 140,000 movie and TV scripts that have been used without permission. (And you should read his other stories about copyright law reaching its breaking point and “the memorization problem.”) In this episode, we also got into the metaphysics of art and asked what sort of questions need to be asked as we hurtle toward the future. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!"

What AI knows about you; Axios, November 4, 2024

 Ina Friend, Axios; What AI knows about you

"Most AI builders don't say where they are getting the data they use to train their bots and models — but legally they're required to say what they are doing with their customers' data.

The big picture: These data-use disclosures open a window onto the otherwise opaque world of Big Tech's AI brain-food fight.

• In this new Axios series, we'll tell you, company by company, what all the key players are saying and doing with your personal information and content.

Why it matters: You might be just fine knowing that picture you just posted on Instagram is helping train the next generative AI art engine. But you might not — or you might just want to be choosier about what you share.

Zoom out: AI makers need an incomprehensibly gigantic amount of raw data to train their large language and image models. 

• The industry's hunger has led to a data land grab: Companies are vying to teach their baby AIs using information sucked in from many different sources — sometimes with the owner's permission, often without it — before new laws and court rulings make that harder. 

Zoom in: Each Big Tech giant is building generative AI models, and many of them are using their customer data, in part, to train them.

• In some cases it's opt-in, meaning your data won't be used unless you agree to it. In other cases it is opt-out, meaning your information will automatically get used unless you explicitly say no. 
• These rules can vary by region, thanks to legal differences. For instance, Meta's Facebook and Instagram are "opt-out" — but you can only opt out if you live in Europe or Brazil.
• In the U.S., California's data privacy law is among the laws responsible for requiring firms to say what they do with user data. In the EU, it's the GDPR."

Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff; The Bookseller, October 18, 2024

 MATILDA BATTERSBY, The Bookseller; Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff

"The world’s biggest trade publisher has changed the wording on its copyright pages to help protect authors’ intellectual property from being used to train large language models (LLMs) and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools, The Bookseller can exclusively reveal.

Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear “in imprint pages across our markets”. The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.

The statement also “expressly reserves [the titles] from the text and data mining exception”, in accordance with a European Parliament directive.

The move specifically to ban the use of its titles by AI firms for the development of chatbots and other digital tools comes amid a slew of copyright infringement cases in the US and reports that large tranches of pirated books have already been used by tech companies to train AI tools. In 2024, several academic publishers including Taylor & Francis, Wiley and Sage have announced partnerships to license content to AI firms.

PRH is believed to be the first of the Big Five anglophone trade publishers to amend its copyright information to reflect the acceleration of AI systems and the alleged reliance by tech companies on using published work to train language models."

His daughter was murdered. Then she reappeared as an AI chatbot.; The Washington Post, October 15, 2024

 Daniel Wu , The Washington Post; His daughter was murdered. Then she reappeared as an AI chatbot.

"Jennifer’s name and image had been used to create a chatbot on Character.AI, a website that allows users to converse with digital personalities made using generative artificial intelligence. Several people had interacted with the digital Jennifer, which was created by a user on Character’s website, according to a screenshot of her chatbot’s now-deleted profile.

Crecente, who has spent the years since his daughter’s death running a nonprofit organization in her name to prevent teen dating violence, said he was appalled that Character had allowed a user to create a facsimile of a murdered high-schooler without her family’s permission. Experts said the incident raises concerns about the AI industry’s ability — or willingness — to shield users from the potential harms of a service that can deal in troves of sensitive personal information...

The company’s terms of service prevent users from impersonating any person or entity...

AI chatbots can engage in conversation and be programmed to adopt the personalities and biographical details of specific characters, real or imagined. They have found a growing audience online as AI companies market the digital companions as friends, mentors and romantic partners...

Rick Claypool, who researched AI chatbots for the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, said while laws governing online content at large could apply to AI companies, they have largely been left to regulate themselves. Crecente isn’t the first grieving parent to have their child’s information manipulated by AI: Content creators on TikTok have used AI to imitate the voices and likenesses of missing children and produce videos of them narrating their deaths, to outrage from the children’s families, The Post reported last year.

“We desperately need for lawmakers and regulators to be paying attention to the real impacts these technologies are having on their constituents,” Claypool said. “They can’t just be listening to tech CEOs about what the policies should be … they have to pay attention to the families and individuals who have been harmed.”

Fake Cases, Real Consequences [No digital link as of 10/1/24]; ABA Journal, Oct./Nov. 2024 Issue

 John Roemer, ABA Journal; Fake Cases, Real Consequences [No digital link as of 10/1/24]

"Legal commentator Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA School of Law who tracks AI in litigation, in February reported on the 14th court case he's found in which AI-hallucinated false citations appeared. It was a Missouri Court of Appeals opinion that assessed the offending appellant $10,000 in damages for a frivolous filing.

Hallucinations aren't the only snag, Volokh says. "It's also with the output mischaracterizing the precedents or omitting key context. So one still has to check that output to make sure it's sound, rather than just including it in one's papers.

Echoing Volokh and other experts, ChatGPT itself seems clear-eyed about its limits. When asked about hallucinations in legal research, it replied in part: "Hallucinations in chatbot answers could potentially pose a problem for lawyers if they relied solely on the information provided by the chatbot without verifying its accuracy."

Should You Be Allowed to Profit From A.I.-Generated Art?; The New York Times, September 27, 2024

 Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Times; Should You Be Allowed to Profit From A.I.-Generated Art?

[Excerpt]

"We attempt to attribute art whenever we can, and anything that’s only for purchase we either avoid or pay for. This particular piece seems to be available only in an Etsy shop, where the creator apparently uses A.I. prompts to generate images. The price is nominal: a few dollars. Yet I cannot help thinking that those who make A.I.-generated art are taking other artists’ work, essentially recreating it and then profiting from it. 

I’m not sure what the best move is...Name Withheld

From the Ethicist:

There’s a sense in which A.I. image generators — such as DALL-E 3, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion — make use of the intellectual property of the artists whose work they’ve been trained on. But the same is true of human artists. The history of art is the history of people borrowing and adapting techniques and tropes from earlier work, with occasional moments of deep originality...

Maybe you’re worried that A.I. image generators will undermine the value of human-made art. Such concerns have a long history. In his classic 1935 essay, ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’’ the critic Walter Benjamin pointed out that techniques for reproducing artworks have been invented throughout history. In antiquity, the Greeks had foundries for reproducing bronzes; in time, woodcuts were widely used to make multiple copies of images; etching, lithography and photography later added new possibilities. These technologies raised the question of what Benjamin called the ‘‘aura’’ of the individual artwork...

As forms of artificial intelligence grow increasingly widespread, we need to get used to so-called ‘‘centaur’’ models — collaborations between human and machine cognition."

Startup using blockchain to prevent copyright theft by AI is valued over $2 billion after fresh funding; CNBC, August 21, 2024

 Ryan Browne, CNBC; Startup using blockchain to prevent copyright theft by AI is valued over $2 billion after fresh funding

"San-Francisco-based startup Story said Wednesday that it raised $80 million of funding for a blockchain designed to prevent artificial intelligence makers like OpenAI from taking creators’ intellectual property without permission."

Meta in Talks to Use Voices of Judi Dench, Awkwafina and Others for A.I.; The New York Times, August 2, 2024

Mike Isaac and Nicole Sperling , The New York Times; Meta in Talks to Use Voices of Judi Dench, Awkwafina and Others for A.I.

"Meta is in discussions with Awkwafina, Judi Dench and other actors and influencers for the right to incorporate their voices into a digital assistant product called MetaAI, according to three people with knowledge of the talks, as the company pushes to build more products that feature artificial intelligence.

Apart from Ms. Dench and Awkwafina, Meta is in talks with the comedian Keegan-Michael Key and other celebrities, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are private. They added that all of Hollywood’s top talent agencies were involved in negotiations with the tech giant." 

Following Scarlett Johansson Flap, Intellectual Property Expert Talks AI and the Law; UVAToday, June 24, 2024

Josette Corazza, UVAToday ; Following Scarlett Johansson Flap, Intellectual Property Expert Talks AI and the Law

"UVA School of Law professor Dotan Oliar, an expert in intellectual property who teaches art law and copyright, looked at the OpenAI controversies and how artificial intelligence is raising new legal questions and reviving old debates.

Q. What recourse does an actor have when Open AI claims to use a similar voice, but not the actual voice?

A. The “right of publicity” is the relevant body of intellectual property law available to celebrities who believe their voice (or image or likeness) was misappropriated. This is a state, rather than federal, cause of (legal) action and a right now protected in the majority of states, although the scope of protection is not the same everywhere.

In a similar case from 1988, Ford Motor Co. wanted to use Bette Midler’s voice for a commercial, and just like reportedly happened here, Midler declined. Ford went and hired a “sound-alike” person. In a then-precedential ruling, the 9th Circuit Court decided in Midler’s favor and held that a person’s voice was a protected attribute within their right of publicity."

GENERATIVE AI IS CREATING A COPYRIGHT CRISIS FOR ARTISTS; Mind Matters, June 3, 2024

DENYSE O'LEARY, 

Mind Matters; GENERATIVE AI IS CREATING A COPYRIGHT CRISIS FOR ARTISTS

"The problem, Crawford and Schultz say, is that copyright law, as currently framed, does not really protect individuals under these circumstances. That’s not surprising. Copyright dates back to at least 1710 and the issues were very different then.

For one thing, as Jonathan Bartlett pointed out last December, when the New York Times launched a lawsuit for copyright violation against Microsoft and OpenAI, everyone accepted that big search engines have always violated copyright. But if they brought people to your site, while saving and using your content for themselves, you were getting something out of it at least.

But it’s different with generative AI and the chatbot. They use and replace your content. Users are not going back to you for more. OpenAI freely admits that it violates copyright but relies on loopholes to get around legal responsibility.

As the lawsuits pile up, it’s clear that gen AI and chatbots can’t work without these billions of images and texts. So we either do without them or we find a way to compensate the producers."

Eight US newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement; Associated Press via The Guardian, April 30, 2024

 Associated Press via The Guardian; Eight US newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

"A group of eight US newspapers is suing ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the technology companies have been “purloining millions” of copyrighted news articles without permission or payment to train their artificial intelligence chatbots."

This AI chatbot was ‘trained’ using my books, but don’t blame me for its incredible stupidity; Los Angeles Times, October 5, 2023

MICHAEL HILTZIK, Los Angeles Times; This AI chatbot was ‘trained’ using my books, but don’t blame me for its incredible stupidity

"Alex Reisner of the Atlantic compiled a handy search tool for the database, which is known as Books3, giving authors the world over an opportunity to hunt for their names and decide how to think about the results."

Google hit with class-action lawsuit over AI data scraping; Reuters, July 11, 2023

Blake Brittain, Reuters ; Google hit with class-action lawsuit over AI data scraping

"Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O) was accused in a proposed class action lawsuit on Tuesday of misusing vast amounts of personal information and copyrighted material to train its artificial intelligence systems.

The complaint, filed in San Francisco federal court by eight individuals seeking to represent millions of internet users and copyright holders, said Google's unauthorized scraping of data from websites violated their privacy and property rights."