“AI Firms Under Fire for Allegedly Infringing on Copyrights“
News to no one other than AI firms that invented technology without thinking of anyone other than themselves — when you scrape billions of images and texts, and those items all are copyrighted, and you never ask permission, you kinda, maybe, definitely are an a$$ho– sorry, copyright infringer.
Our favorite lawsuit so far is Getty Images showing that under certain AI image creation requests you can literally see pieces of the letters that have the “Getty Images” watermark. These generative AI tools are collage makers, not creators of new works … they use reference materials and take snippets of different things they’ve scraped to pass off as creating something new. Don’t get me wrong, collage is art, but it does involve taking pieces of other creators’ works.
Also, when your AI scrapes known piracy websites (because you cannot access literary works en masse and not pay for them without using piracy), you are acknowledging that you are using infringing materials in your data pool.
The New York Times just started a lawsuit against generative AI for scraping their articles … because, of course, “in the vein of” or similar generative AI is just taking pieces of different sections of someone’s work, changing a few words, and collaging them together.
This article is great because it also links to all the different lawsuits going on. I think AI is fascinating, and can be really useful in certain areas, but like so many ventures the creators of the tech were so narrow-minded and self-centered they only thought of what they could create and not all the people’s works they stole. The irony being, because generative AI must have large amounts of data sets to learn from, without human creators of original works, they would be the same as a skull with no brain in them.
PS Featured Generative AI image “Getty Images Watermark” brought to you by … “I would love to know how this prompt led to this art” and “Did it just ignore my prompt and draw whatever it wanted?”
