All posts tagged: copyright

Google Is Getting Thousands of Deepfake Porn Complaints

Google Is Getting Thousands of Deepfake Porn Complaints

Each method is weaponized—almost always against women—to degrade, harass, or cause shame, among other harms. Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s e-safety commissioner, says her office is starting to see more deepfakes reported to its image-based abuse complaints scheme, alongside other AI-generated content, such as “synthetic” child sexual abuse and children using apps to create sexualized videos of their classmates. “We know it’s a really underreported form of abuse,” Grant says. As the number of videos on deepfake websites has grown, content creators—such as streamers and adult models—have used DMCA requests. The DMCA allows people who own the intellectual property of certain content to request it be removed from the websites directly or from search results. More than 8 billion takedown requests, covering everything from gaming to music, have been made to Google. “The DMCA historically has been an important way for victims of image-based sexual abuse to get their content removed from the internet,” says Carrie Goldberg, a victims’ rights attorney. Goldberg says newer criminal laws and civil law procedures make it easier to get some …

Generative AI Might Finally Bend Copyright Past the Breaking Point

Generative AI Might Finally Bend Copyright Past the Breaking Point

It took Ralph Ellison seven years to write Invisible Man. It took J. D. Salinger about 10 to write The Catcher in the Rye. J. K. Rowling spent at least five years on the first Harry Potter book. Writing with the hope of publishing is always a leap of faith. Will you finish the project? Will it find an audience? Whether authors realize it or not, the gamble is justified to a great extent by copyright. Who would spend all that time and emotional energy writing a book if anyone could rip the thing off without consequence? This is the sentiment behind at least nine recent copyright-infringement lawsuits against companies that are using tens of thousands of copyrighted books—at least—to train generative-AI systems. One of the suits alleges “systematic theft on a mass scale,” and AI companies are potentially liable for hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more. In response, companies such as OpenAI and Meta have argued that their language models “learn” from books and produce “transformative” original work, just like humans. Therefore, …

Five ways to save quality journalism on the open web

Five ways to save quality journalism on the open web

The Buzzfeed newsroom in New York. Picture: Reuters/Brendan McDermid At a recent gathering of investigative journalists I heard plenty about the challenges they face in today’s industry. A creeping culture of Government secrecy, which pervades everything from adherence to the Freedom of Information Act to the attitude of press officers, was one common refrain. The other major challenge they reported was the fact their resources were not equal to the task in hand meaning that good stories are going untold. Ten years ago online advertising funded a boom in investigative journalism from the likes of Buzzfeed News, Vice News and Exaro. All are no more. Heavy cuts at a local level, with perhaps 9,000 out of 13,000 local newspaper journalism jobs cut since the mid-2000s, local news reporters must feel like the boy with his finger in the proverbial dyke. Thanks for subscribing. Close Shortly before Christmas I tipped off my local paper about a serious stabbing involving a child at a public event in a nearby village, which was the talk of the school …

Digital Media Outlets Sue OpenAI for Copyright Infringement

Digital Media Outlets Sue OpenAI for Copyright Infringement

The media outlets Raw Story, Alternet and The Intercept sued OpenAI for copyright infringement on Wednesday, adding to a growing chorus pushing back against the company’s methods of scraping content off the internet to train its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. The online publications sued OpenAI in a New York federal court in two separate cases, saying that the ChatGPT creator trained its chatbot using copyrighted works by journalists without properly crediting or citing them. The companies are seeking damages in the amount of at least $2,500 per violation, as well as asking OpenAI to remove all copyrighted articles from data training sets. The Intercept also sued Microsoft, an OpenAI partner that developed its own chatbot called Bing with the same copyrighted information, according to the lawsuit. “It is time that news organizations fight back against Big Tech’s continued attempts to monetize other people’s work,” John Byrne, the chief executive and founder of Raw Story, which owns Alternet, said in a statement. “Big Tech has decimated journalism. It’s time that publishers take a stand.” OpenAI and Microsoft …

Amazon Studios Hit With Copyright, AI Claim

Amazon Studios Hit With Copyright, AI Claim

A legal fight is brewing over the upcoming Road House remake, with the original film’s screenwriter suing Amazon Studios. R. Lance Hill, in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in California federal court, accuses MGM Studios and its parent, Amazon, of copyright infringement for refusing to license his 1986 screenplay after he allegedly clawed back the rights to his work. He seeks a court order blocking the release of the movie. According to the complaint, Amazon instituted a self-imposed deadline to complete the remake. To meet this deadline, which was threatened by the actors strike, the suit claims Amazon resorted to using generative artificial intelligence to replicate the voices of the movie’s actors in violation of the collective bargaining agreements of SAG-AFTRA and the Director’s Guild of America. In a statement, a spokesperson for Amazon MGM Studios said the lawsuit is “completely without merit” and that “numerous allegations are categorically false.” “The film does not use any AI in place of actors’ voices,” the statement added. “We look forward to defending ourselves against these claims.” The feud is the …

OpenAI says New York Times ‘hacked’ ChatGPT to build copyright lawsuit

OpenAI says New York Times ‘hacked’ ChatGPT to build copyright lawsuit

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to dismiss parts of the New York Times copyright lawsuit against it, arguing that the newspaper “hacked” its chatbot ChatGPT and other artificial-intelligence systems to generate misleading evidence for the case. OpenAI said in a filing in Manhattan federal court on Monday that the Times caused the technology to reproduce its material through “deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI’s terms of use.” “The allegations in the Times’s complaint do not meet its famously rigorous journalistic standards,” OpenAI said. “The truth, which will come out in the course of this case, is that the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products.” Representatives for the New York Times and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing. The Times sued OpenAI and its largest financial backer Microsoft in December, accusing them of using millions of its articles without permission to train chatbots to provide information to users. The Times is among several copyright owners that have sued tech companies over the alleged misuse of their work in …

How to write books using AI with full copyright and ownership

How to write books using AI with full copyright and ownership

If you are interested in learning more about how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to write books. This new AI writing workflow for authors featured by the Nerdy Novelist, allows writers to use AI to draft their books while retaining full copyright of the final product. The workflow involves several steps, starting with the creation of a rough draft using AI, followed by a review and dictation process to refine the content. Imagine having AI tools at your disposal and a detailed workflow that can jump-start your writing, providing a foundation upon which you can build your literary masterpiece. AI writing tools are now sophisticated enough to generate initial drafts for authors. These tools, like SudoWrite and the advanced GPT-4, can take a simple story outline and turn it into a foundational draft. This isn’t about replacing the author’s touch; rather, it’s about giving writers a starting point. From there, authors can take the reins, shaping and molding the narrative into something that truly reflects their vision. Learn how to write AI books with full …

Hiltzik: Who’s winning in Sarah Silverman’s copyright suit against OpenAI?

Hiltzik: Who’s winning in Sarah Silverman’s copyright suit against OpenAI?

If you’ve been following the war between authors and the purveyors of AI chatbots over whether the latter are infringing the copyrights of the former, you might have concluded that comedian and author Sarah Silverman and several fellow authors suffered a crushing blow in their lawsuit against OpenAI, the leading bot maker. In his ruling Feb. 12, federal Judge Areceli Martínez-Olguín of San Francisco indeed tossed most of the copyright claims Silverman et. al had brought against OpenAI in lawsuits filed last year. That’s the way much of the press portrayed the outcome: “Judge dismisses most of Sarah Silverman’s copyright infringement lawsuit” (VentureBeat). And “OpenAI Scores Court Victory” (Forbes). And “Sarah Silverman, Authors See Most Claims Against OpenAI Dismissed by Judge” (Hollywood Reporter). If someone tells you it’s not about the money but the principle, they’re really talking about the money. — Robin Feldman, UC College of the Law Well, not really. Of the six counts in the authors’ lawsuit, one — whether OpenAI directly copied or distributed the plaintiffs’ works — wasn’t even before …

U.S. court dismisses most claims against OpenAI in copyright class action

U.S. court dismisses most claims against OpenAI in copyright class action

A U.S. federal court has partially dismissed a class action lawsuit accusing OpenAI of infringing on copyright by training its AI chatbot on authors’ work. This doesn’t mean ChatGPT’s developer is in the clear, though. Brought by authors Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey, the lawsuit specifically accuses OpenAI of direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, knowingly distributing a work after removing its copyright information, unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment.  However, four of these six allegations were thrown out on Monday, with a California judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín determining that the plaintiffs had not provided enough facts or reasoning to support their claims. SEE ALSO: The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement “Plaintiffs fail to explain what the [OpenAI language model] outputs entail or allege that any particular output is substantially similar — or similar at all — to their books,” Martínez-Olguín wrote, specifically addressing the allegation of vicarious copyright infringement. The only two claims left standing are the allegation of direct copyright infringement, which was the sole …

The New York Times’ AI copyright lawsuit shows that forgiveness might not be better than permission

The New York Times’ AI copyright lawsuit shows that forgiveness might not be better than permission

The New York Times’ (NYT) legal proceedings against OpenAI and Microsoft has opened a new frontier in the ongoing legal challenges brought on by the use of copyrighted data to “train”, or improve generative AI. There are already a variety of lawsuits against AI companies, including one brought by Getty Images against StabilityAI, which makes the Stable Diffusion online text-to-image generator. Authors George R.R. Martin and John Grisham have also brought legal cases against ChatGPT owner OpenAI over copyright claims. But the NYT case is not “more of the same” because it throws interesting new arguments into the mix. The legal action focuses in on the value of the training data and a new question relating to reputational damage. It is a potent mix of trade marks and copyright and one which may test the fair use defences typically relied upon. It will, no doubt, be watched closely by media organisations looking to challenge the usual “let’s ask for forgiveness, not permission” approach to training data. Training data is used to improve the performance of …