Artificial intelligence tools that generate text, images and music are moving art into new territory — and that’s raising tricky questions for the business of creativity.
For early adopters like Insider, the publication that this past week announced an experiment with AI-aided articles, the new tools promise more efficient content creation. But for many artists, and the businesses that own their work, generative AI is a double threat. These systems can produce copycats of human works that dilute the market, and they use artists’ production, without their permission, as training data.
Some see that as stealing intellectual property: Universal Music Group recently told music streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block AI systems from scraping its music. (The company is in early discussions to license its songs to generative AI companies, DealBook hears.)
Lawmakers have begun to contemplate new rules around authorship and ownership in connection with creative machines, and the stakes are huge for both the businesses that depend on creative work and the investors who poured billions into new AI tools. So far, there are three major debates.
What is owed to the creators of the original material? In January, a group of artists sued London-based Stability AI, a maker of image-generating software, arguing that it infringed on their copyrights by using their work in training data and creating derivative works. Cartoonist Sarah Anderson, who is part of the lawsuit, told The New York Times that she believed artists should opt in to having their work included in such data and should be compensated for it. Getty Images is also suing Stability AI in Britain and the United States for what it calls “brazen infringement” of millions of photos. Getty argued that the theft is particularly offensive because it has agreements to license data for machine learning. Stability AI has not responded to the complaints.
Does “fair use” apply? Copyrighted works can be used without permission for commentary, criticism or other “transformative” purposes, and robots have traditionally been exempt from liability. But “courts in the future won’t be so sympathetic to machine copying,” wrote Mark Lemley, the director of a Stanford Law School program that focuses on science and technology, in the Texas Law Review with a former colleague, Bryan Casey. Lemley is calling for a new “fair learning” standard for using copyrighted material in machine learning. It would include the question: What is the purpose of the copying? If it’s to learn only, that may be permitted, but if the intent is to reproduce the work, it will not be. Not every machine learning data set would qualify for the protection. New tools also raise questions about who has liability for infringement — the user prompting the machine, the company that programmed the tool or both?
Who owns the output of generative AI? For now, only a human’s work can be copyrighted, but what about work that partly relies on generative AI? Some tool developers have said they won’t assert copyright over content generated by their machines. In February, the Copyright Office rejected a copyright for AI-generated images in a graphic novel, though the writer argued that she had made the images via “a creative, iterative process” that involved “composition, selection, arrangement, cropping and editing for each image.” The government compared use of the AI tool to hiring an artist. But the lines may blur as the use of such tools becomes more common. Like the tools, the intellectual property issues are a work in progress that will only get more complex.
View original article on nytimes.com
© 2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
