AI Set To Crash In 2024

Judges so far have been skeptical of the plaintiffs’ infringement claims based on the content generated by AI.

But courts have not yet addressed the trickier, potentially multi-billion-dollar question of whether AI companies are infringing on a massive scale by training their systems with reams of images, writings and other data scraped from the internet.

Tech companies warn that the lawsuits could create giant roadblocks for the burgeoning AI industry.

The plaintiffs say the companies owe them for using their work without permission or compensation.Several groups of authors have filed proposed class-action lawsuits this year over the use of their text in AI training.

They include writers ranging from John Grisham and “Game of Thrones” author George R.R. Martin to comedian Sarah Silverman and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

Similar lawsuits have also been filed by copyright holders including visual artists, music publishers, stock-photo provider Getty Images and the New York Times.

They all argue that tech companies infringe their copyrights by taking and reproducing their materials without permission for AI training.

The plaintiffs are asking for monetary damages and for court orders blocking the misuse of their workSilicon Valley venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz said that “imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development.”

Copyright owners, meanwhile, point to the companies’ enormous success with AI programs like OpenAI’s large language model-based (LLM) chatbot ChatGPT — and say they have money to spare.

“Licensing the copyrighted materials to train their LLMs may be expensive — and indeed it should be given the enormous part of the value of any LLM that is attributable to professionally created texts,” writers trade group The Authors Guild told the copyright office.