Generative AI is coming and it’s going to put us all out of work!
That is if it can survive the onslaught of lawsuits seeking to hobble it before it can even get started.
And let’s not act like “how” generative AI got here isn’t a big deal. After all, if it can generate works like a master, it must have learned from someone who has mastered an art whether it is photography, videography, painting, and so on.
According to Futurism citing the plaintiffs’ complaint, they found their work in the dataset used by Google’s LAION-400M data set (Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network). This dataset consists of 400 million images, some of which are copyrighted. The plaintiffs are hoping to have the use of their images classified as copyright infringement, noting that the law is lagging behind technological developments in this area.
Midjoureny and Stable Diffusion were named in other lawsuits and Futurism writes that Google updated the documentation on its platform, “omitting” the source of its training in what the website writes was possible because the company “hoped to avoid being named as a defendant in a lawsuit over the legality of training on mass quantities of copyrighted works without consent, credit, or compensation.”
It probably can’t be overstated how important it is in these early stages that actual copyright infringement be identified as such. If the courts were to rule that generative AI merely takes inspiration or direction or some kind of other “fair use” argument, then we could see this all go downhill and fast for a lot of people. Of course, we’ll keep you updated on this blog as things progress.
Do you have any thoughts on how creators should be compensated if their work is used to build generative AI models? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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