AI is learning from stolen intellectual property. It needs to stop.; The Washington Post, October 19, 2023

William D. Cohan , The Washington Post; AI is learning from stolen intellectual property. It needs to stop.

"The other day someone sent me the searchable database published by Atlantic magazine of more than 191,000 e-books that have been used to train the generative AI systems being developed by Meta, Bloomberg and others. It turns out that four of my seven books are in the data set, called Books3. Whoa.

Not only did I not give permission for my books to be used to generate AI products, but I also wasn’t even consulted about it. I had no idea this was happening. Neither did my publishers, Penguin Random House (for three of the books) and Macmillan (for the other one). Neither my publishers nor I were compensated for use of my intellectual property. Books3 just scraped the content away for free, with Meta et al. profiting merrily along the way. And Books3 is just one of many pirated collections being used for this purpose...

This is wholly unacceptable behavior. Our books are copyrighted material, not free fodder for wealthy companies to use as they see fit, without permission or compensation. Many, many hours of serious research, creative angst and plain old hard work go into writing and publishing a book, and few writers are compensated like professional athletes, Hollywood actors or Wall Street investment bankers. Stealing our intellectual property hurts."

Authors sue Meta, Microsoft, Bloomberg in latest AI copyright clash; Reuters, October 18, 2023

Blake Brittain, Reuters ; Authors sue Meta, Microsoft, Bloomberg in latest AI copyright clash

"A group of writers including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and best-selling Christian author Lysa TerKeurst have filed a lawsuit in New York federal court that accuses Meta (META.O), Microsoft (MSFT.O) and Bloomberg of using their work to train artificial intelligence systems without permission.

The proposed class-action copyright lawsuit filed on Tuesday said that the companies used the controversial "Books3" dataset, which the writers said contains thousands of pirated books, to teach their large language models how to respond to human prompts."

Meta launches AudioCraft, an open-source AI music generator; Mashable, August 3, 2023

Cecily Mauran  , Mashable; Meta launches AudioCraft, an open-source AI music generator

"Meta's new AI music generator is the latest in a slew of AI products recently released by the tech company. 

On Wednesday, Meta announced the release of AudioCraft, an open-source generative AI that creates audio and music from text prompts. AudioCraft has three models, MusicGen for composing music, AudioGen for creating sound effects, and EnCodec, which uses AI to assist in audio compression that outperforms the MP3 format. 

In case you were wondering about copyright issues, MusicGen was trained on Meta-owned and licensed music."

Llama 2: why is Meta releasing open-source AI model and are there any risks?; The Guardian, July 20, 2023

Dan Milmo , The Guardian; Llama 2: why is Meta releasing open-source AI model and are there any risks?

"Are there concerns about open-source AI?

Tech professionals including Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI, have expressed concerns about an AI arms race. Open-sourcing makes a powerful tool in this technology available to all.

Dame Wendy Hall, regius professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, told the Today programme there were questions over whether the tech industry could be trusted to self-regulate LLMs, with the problem looming even larger for open-source models. “It’s a bit like giving people a template to build a nuclear bomb,” she said.

Dr Andrew Rogoyski, of the Institute for People-Centred AI at the University of Surrey, said open-source models were difficult to regulate. “You can’t really regulate open source. You can regulate the repositories, like Github or Hugging Face, under local legislation,” he said.

“You can issue licence terms on the software that, if abused, could make the abusing company liable under various forms of legal redress. However, being open source means anyone can get their hands on it, so it doesn’t stop the wrong people grabbing the software, nor does it stop anyone from misusing it.”"

Thousands of authors urge AI companies to stop using work without permission; Morning Edition, NPR, July 17, 2023

Chloe Veltman, Morning Edition NPR; Thousands of authors urge AI companies to stop using work without permission

"Thousands of writers including Nora Roberts, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Michael Chabon and Margaret Atwood have signed a letter asking artificial intelligence companies like OpenAI and Meta to stop using their work without permission or compensation."

Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement; The Verge, July 9, 2023

Wes Davis, The Verge ; Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement

"Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement. 

The suits alleges, among other things, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”"

Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads; Semafor, July 6, 2023

 Max Tani, Semarfor; Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads

"Twitter is threatening legal action against Meta over its new text-based “Twitter killer” platform, accusing the social media giant of poaching former employees to create a “copycat” application.

On Wednesday, Instagram parent company Meta introduced Threads, a text-based companion to Instagram that resembles Twitter and other text-based social platforms. Just hours later, a lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro, sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accusing the company of engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”

“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in a letter obtained exclusively by Semafor. “Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.”

Spiro accused Meta of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”