OpenAI's ChatGPT may face a copyright quagmire after 'memorizing' these books; The Register, May 3, 2023

Thomas Claburn, The Register; OpenAI's ChatGPT may face a copyright quagmire after 'memorizing' these books

"Tyler Ochoa, a professor in the Law department at Santa Clara University in California, told The Register he fully expects to see lawsuits against the makers of large language models that generate text, including OpenAI, Google, and others.

Ochoa said the copyright issues with AI text generation are exactly the same as the issues with AI image generation. First: is copying large amounts of text or images for training the model fair use? The answer to that, he said, is probably yes.

Second: if the model generates output that's too similar to the input – what the paper refers to as "memorization" – is that copyright infringement? The answer to that, he said, is almost certainly yes.

And third: if the output of an AI text generator is not a copy of an existing text, is it protected by copyright?

Under current law, said Ochoa, the answer is no – because US copyright law requires human creativity, though some countries will disagree and will protect AI-generated works. However, he added, activities like selecting, arranging, and modifying AI model output makes copyright protection more plausible."

A Photographer Tried to Get His Photos Removed from an AI Dataset. He Got an Invoice Instead.; Vice, April 28, 2023

Chloe Xiang, Vice ; A Photographer Tried to Get His Photos Removed from an AI Dataset. He Got an Invoice Instead.

"The legality of using copyrighted material to train AI is still very contentious and there has not yet been a precedent case that can be used to determine the validity of either side of the case."

AI-created images lose U.S. copyrights in test for new technology; Reuters, February 22, 2023

Blake Brittain, Reuters; AI-created images lose U.S. copyrights in test for new technology

"Images in a graphic novel that were created using the artificial-intelligence system Midjourney should not have been granted copyright protection, the U.S. Copyright Office said in a letter seen by Reuters.

"Zarya of the Dawn" author Kris Kashtanova is entitled to a copyright for the parts of the book Kashtanova wrote and arranged, but not for the images produced by Midjourney, the office said in its letter, dated Tuesday."

I Can't Get No Compensation: AI Image Generators and Copyright; Lexology, February 15, 2023

Davis Wright Tremaine LLP - James Rosenfeld, Barry A. Stulberg and Stevin S. George, Lexology; I Can't Get No Compensation: AI Image Generators and Copyright

"This case (and those mentioned in footnote 1), together with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Foundation v. Goldsmith case argued October 12, 2022, before the U.S. Supreme Court (addressing the question of what does it mean for a work of art to be transformative "fair use" under U.S. copyright law, docket 21-869) will require courts to balance the competing interests of content owners and AI innovators."

AI Image Generators Can Exactly Replicate Copyrighted Photos; PetaPixel, February 2, 2023

 MATT GROWCOOT, PetaPixel; AI Image Generators Can Exactly Replicate Copyrighted Photos

"The team recreated a portrait of Ann Graham Lotz using Stable Diffusion, a side-by-side comparison reveals flaws such as distortion and noise in the AI image but there is little doubt that it is the same picture. 

However, two of the researchers revealed to Gizmodo that the team tried 300,000 text prompts and found that the AI image generators only recreated an exact image 0.03% of the time, the rate was even lower for Stable Diffusion which is available to the public, unlike Google’s Imagen.

“The caveat here is that the model is supposed to generalize, it’s supposed to generate novel images rather than spitting out a memorized version,” Vikash Sehwag, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, tells Gizmodo. 

Despite the low rate of image recreation, the fact that this happens at all is alarming. Some AI image generators reserve rights to their images, effectively claiming copyright. This could be problematic if the AI generates the exact same image taken by a photographer."

Are A.I. Image Generators Violating Copyright Laws?; Smithsonian Magazine, January 24, 2023

Ella Feldman,  Smithsonian Magazine; Are A.I. Image Generators Violating Copyright Laws?

"Both lawsuits argue that by scraping the web for images, A.I. image generators unjustly rob artists, using their work without crediting or rewarding them...

​​In response to the artists’ lawsuit, a spokesperson for Stability AI says the company takes “these matters seriously,” and that “anyone that believes that this isn’t fair use does not understand the technology and misunderstands the law,” per Reuters. Speaking with the Associated Press in December, before the lawsuits were filed, Midjourney CEO David Holz compared the process behind his image generating service to the process behind human creativity, which often entails drawing inspiration from other artists."