Judge Vince Chhabria of the US District Court in Northern California has dismissed portions of Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden’s class action lawsuit against Meta. The judge granted Meta’s motion to dismiss claims that the output of Meta’s large language model, LLaMA, infringes on their copyrights, saying that he didn’t understand how the AI tool’s output was similar to Silverman’s book. The plaintiffs may amend the claim, but for it to stand they must “argue that LLaMa’s output was substantially similar to their works,” Reuters reports. Meta has not responded to the authors’ main argument, that their books’ […]
AI
While Copyright Office Considers, FTC Is Already Concerned that Generative AI Is Unfair Competition for Creators
As the US Copyright Office considers the thousands of comments on “copyright law and policy issues raised by artificial intelligence systems,” the Federal Trade Commission drew attention with a press release to their own position on generative AI in the marketplace — suggesting the agency stands ready to protect creators from unfair competition and consumers from non-transparent machine-generated content. From a pure copyright perspective, resolving issues around fair use could take months to formulate and legislate, or more likely years to litigate, while the world changes before creators’ eyes. Importantly, the FTC states more definitively what creators have been waiting […]
Copyright Office Shares Comments On AI Legal Issues
Earlier this year the US Copyright Office solicited comment on “copyright law and policy issues raised by artificial intelligence systems,” in order to “help assess whether legislative or regulatory steps in this area are warranted.” They have received nearly 10,000 comments, which were recently posted into a searchable archive, including extensive submissions from market leaders such as OpenAI, Google and Meta. Google takes the classic tech company approach, suggesting any issues should be left to the courts (where final adjudication will be glacial). Like all of their peers, they argue that large language models (LLMs) are just math; they “capture […]
Frankfurt Book Fair: JIBF Breakfast, AI in Publishing
The Jerusalem International Book Forum held its annual reunion breakfast on Thursday at Villa Bonn in Frankfurt, an emotional scene this year, in light of the developing situation in the Middle East. The JIBF organizers themselves were unable to attend, and Zoomed in from their homes, making remarks that caused people in the audience–a high-powered crowd including editors and executives from the corporate publishers and bigger US indies–to tear up. The event honors past fellows of the Zev Birger Editorial Fellowship sponsored by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which brings book professionals to the JIBF for networking and development. Production coordinator Sharon […]
Springer Nature Announces AI Writing Assistant
Springer Nature has announced Curie, an in-house AI-powered writing assistant that aids researchers–especially those whose first language is not English–in writing academic papers. Curie is an “evolution” of Springer’s digital editing and translation services, managed by the company’s author services arm, AJE. According to a release, the tool “has been specifically trained on academic literature, spanning 447+ areas of study, more than 2,000 field-specific topics and on over 1 million edits on papers published including those in leading Nature journals. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with specialized AI digital editing developed in-house and designed specifically for […]
Authors Respond to OpenAI’s Defense
Attorneys for authors Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey have filed a new brief in their lawsuit against OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, refuting the company’s initial defense. Last month OpenAI moved to dismiss the plaintiffs’ “ancillary” claims, hoping to focus on the core question of copyright infringement. In response, the plaintiffs ask the court to dismiss the motion, and “challenge OpenAI’s position that it should be allowed to train its generative AI products using anyone’s name and copyrighted literary works, without consent, for free, forever.” “In this case, the copyrighted works of a class of millions […]