New bill would force AI companies to reveal use of copyrighted art; The Guardian, April 9, 2024

Nick Robins-Early, The Guardian ; New bill would force AI companies to reveal use of copyrighted art

"A bill introduced in the US Congress on Tuesday intends to force artificial intelligence companies to reveal the copyrighted material they use to make their generative AI models. The legislation adds to a growing number of attempts from lawmakers, news outlets and artists to establish how AI firms use creative works like songs, visual art, books and movies to train their software–and whether those companies are illegally building their tools off copyrighted content.

The California Democratic congressman Adam Schiff introduced the bill, the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act, which would require that AI companies submit any copyrighted works in their training datasets to the Register of Copyrights before releasing new generative AI systems, which create text, images, music or video in response to users’ prompts. The bill would need companies to file such documents at least 30 days before publicly debuting their AI tools, or face a financial penalty. Such datasets encompass billions of lines of text and images or millions of hours of music and movies."

Researchers tested leading AI models for copyright infringement using popular books, and GPT-4 performed worst; CNBC, March 6, 2024

Hayden Field, CNBC; Researchers tested leading AI models for copyright infringement using popular books, and GPT-4 performed worst

"The company, founded by ex-Meta researchers, specializes in evaluation and testing for large language models — the technology behind generative AI products.

Alongside the release of its new tool, CopyrightCatcher, Patronus AI released results of an adversarial test meant to showcase how often four leading AI models respond to user queries using copyrighted text.

The four models it tested were OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2, Meta’s Llama 2 and Mistral AI’s Mixtral.

“We pretty much found copyrighted content across the board, across all models that we evaluated, whether it’s open source or closed source,” Rebecca Qian, Patronus AI’s cofounder and CTO, who previously worked on responsible AI research at Meta, told CNBC in an interview.

Qian added, “Perhaps what was surprising is that we found that OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is arguably the most powerful model that’s being used by a lot of companies and also individual developers, produced copyrighted content on 44% of prompts that we constructed.”"

This AI Model Is Trained On Public Domain Stills To Create Mickey Mouse Images; Cartoon Brew, February 5, 2024

JAMIE LANG, Cartoon Brew ; This AI Model Is Trained On Public Domain Stills To Create Mickey Mouse Images

"In the comments section of an article about Mickey-1928 published by Ars Technica, Langlais explained that he’s aware of the line his model may be crossing by using Stable Diffusion and says that the public domain might provide a lot of answers to the ethical and legal questions raised by the emergence of AI tech:

I do agree with the issues of using a model trained on copyrighted content. I’m currently part of a new project to train a French LLM on public domain/open science/free culture sources, not only out of concern for author rights but also to enforce better standards of reproducibility and data provenance in the field. I’m hoping to see similar efforts on diffusion models this year. My general impression is that the copyright extension terms have made impossible an obvious solution to the AI copyright problem: having AI models trained openly on 20th century culture, and thus creating powerful incentives to digitize newspapers, books, movies for the commons."

Defining Data: Improving Terminology Around Generative AI Models; IP Watchdog, June 21, 2023

FRANKLIN GRAVES & ELIZABETH ROTHMAN , IP Watchdog; Defining Data: Improving Terminology Around Generative AI Models

"Generative AI tools are here to stay and will continue to become even more engrained into the products, services, and experiences we encounter on a daily basis. Improving the terminology is an important step as we move forward."

Generative AI Debate Braces for Post-Warhol Fair Use Impact; Bloomberg Law, May 30, 2023

Isaiah Poritz , Bloomberg Law; Generative AI Debate Braces for Post-Warhol Fair Use Impact

"While the courts may take years to decide whether generative AI models are fair use, the litigation underway is many steps ahead of Congress, which hasn’t yet enacted legislation to regulate the burgeoning technology. In the meantime, some observers see peril for the AI industry.

“Copyright law is the only law that’s already in existence that could bring generative AI systems to their knees,” Pamela Samuelson, a copyright law professor at the University of California Berkeley, said at a lecture on AI last month. “If the court says ingesting is infringement, the whole thing can be destroyed.”