YoIt’s an unlikely alliance: billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and a panoply of notable artists, including Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, actors Kevin Bacon and Julianne Moore, and author Kazuo Ishiguro.
Two very public fights began this week with artificial intelligence companies, accusing them of using their intellectual property without permission to build the increasingly powerful and lucrative new technology.
More than 13,000 creative professionals from the worlds of literature, music, film, theater and television issued a statement warning that training programs by artificial intelligence companies like ChatGPT in their unlicensed works represented a “significant threat and unfair” to their livelihoods. By the end of the week, that number had nearly doubled to 25,000.
It came a day after Murdoch, owner of the News Corp publishing group, whose newspapers include the Wall Street Journal, the Sun, the Times and the Australian, launched legal action against the artificial intelligence-powered search engine Perplexity, accusing it of of “illegally copying” some of its American journalistic titles.
The Stars’ statement is a concerted effort to challenge the idea that creative works can be used as training data without reward for reasons of “fair use,” a US legal term that means no permission is needed from the rights owner. author. Adding to their anger is the fact that these AI models can be used to produce new jobs that compete with those of humans.
AI was a key point in last year’s dual strikes by Hollywood actors and writers, which secured deals to ensure new technology remains under the control of workers, rather than being used to replace them. Several ongoing legal cases are likely to decide whether the copyright battle will be as successful.
In the United States, artists are also suing the technology companies behind the image generators, major record labels are suing AI music creators Suno and Udio, and a group of authors, including John Grisham and George RR Martin, are suing ChatGPT developer OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement.
In the battle to get AI companies to pay for the content they are mining to build their tools, publishers are also seeking legal avenues to get them to the negotiating table to sign licensing deals.
Publishers such as Axel Springer, owner of Politico, Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue, the Financial Times and Reuters, have content deals with several AI companies, and in May, News Corp signed a five-year deal with OpenAI, reportedly valued at 250 million dollars. In contrast, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against the creator of ChatGPT and last week sent a “cease and desist” letter to Perplexity.
In the UK, however, AI companies are pushing to change the law to allow them to continue developing their tools without the risk of infringing intellectual property rights. Currently, text and data mining required to train generative AI tools is only permitted for non-commercial research purposes.
This week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called for rethinking what “fair use” is. He argued that the large language models that underpin generative AI are not “regurgitating” the information they were trained on, which would be considered copyright infringement.
New Labor AI and digital government minister Feryal Clark recently said she wanted to resolve the copyright dispute between the creative industries and AI companies by the end of the year.
She said that could be in the form of amendment to existing laws or new legislationwhich opens the possibility of a new clause being added allowing artificial intelligence companies to extract data for commercial purposes.
“Tech companies have used a lot of free UK content to train large language models and are now pushing to weaken UK law to cover their tracks,” said Dan Conway, chief executive of the Publishers Association.
“A cost of your business is paying for the content you are using. Labor has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to set the political conditions for responsible AI in the UK. “Licensing agreements should be signed between creative industries and AI companies to support the UK ecosystem.”
While news groups publicly lobby against AI exploitation of their content, behind the scenes many are embracing the technology to replace editorial functions, fueling fears among staff that it will be used as a Trojan horse by business-challenged publishers. to enable cost savings and job cuts. .
Last month, the National Union of Journalists launched a campaign to highlight the issue, titled “Journalism before algorithms”.
“The use of AI must be considered against a backdrop of wage stagnation, below-inflation pay increases, understaffed newsrooms and rising layoffs,” he said. “Threats to journalists’ jobs are at the forefront of minds…AI is not a substitute for genuine journalism.”
“There is a question of to what extent publishers use these tools,” said Niamh Burns, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “I think the amount of implementation is low, there is a lot of experimentation out there, but I can see a world where publishers will use some of these tools a lot. However, publishers must be realistic about the scale of efficiencies and revenue generation opportunities.”
Burns said that until now the willingness of publishers to use AI tools that directly impact or create editorial content is related to the commercial pressure that the media environment exerts on that operator.
The once-mighty BuzzFeed, whose market value has fallen from $1 billion at its IPO in 2021 to less than $100 million, has been a Rapid AI adopter amid a context of deep cuts in newsrooms and falling income.
And Newsquest, the second largest newspaper publisher in the UK’s beleaguered local and regional press market, has embarked on initiatives including a rapid increase in the number of “AI-assisted” journalism features.
Quality national newspapers and media brands remain very cautious, with many – including The Guardian – setting out strict principles to guide their work.
However, artificial intelligence tools are being used behind the scenes, such as to categorize large data sets and then allow journalists to report on new and exclusive content.
“I think media companies that are most at commercial risk in the short term are also at risk of overdoing it,” Burns said.
“A lot of it has to do with business models. If you rely on high traffic advertising on social platforms and all you need is scale, not necessarily quality, then AI could be seen as really helping.
“However, creating generative AI content will never be worth the costs and risks (for quality domestic titles). And for any publisher, producing more consistent journalism comes at a long-term cost to quality and a risk to competitiveness.”
