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Several major US and international publishers are joining forces as part of an effort to sue major AI companies for using their content to train their generative AI models and seek new rules governing those actions, Semafor. reported sunday
OpenAI and Google have been accused of using publishers’ content to train their AI models without … [+]
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In accordance with Semafor, The New York Times, News Corp, Axel Springer, Dotdash owner Meredith IAC and others are in the process of forming a coalition to take on AI giants like Google and OpenAI.
The report quotes IAC CEO Joey Levin as warning that AI taking over the media could be “deeper” than the fear of AI displacing humans and taking over the world.
Publishers’ main concern is how AI will affect traffic to their websites from Google searches, as AI chatbots can simply scrape this data from their pages and serve it to the user without attribution or links.
The report of publishers’ efforts to unite comes a week after IAC President Barry Diller warned of The “catastrophic” impact of AI on publishing.
Versus
Earlier this month, the Associated Press appeared to shrug off concerns about AI’s impact on the media by signing a deal with ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, to license a news archive. As part of the deal, the news agency’s “text archive” will be accessible to OpenAI, while AP will leverage the tech company’s “technology and product expertise.” Financial terms of the deal have not been made public.
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Google, OpenAI, Meta and other AI companies like Midjourney have been the target of multiple lawsuits in recent months, as content creators, artists and publishers accused the companies of training their models using their content without their consent or remuneration. One of the most prominent cases was presented earlier this month, as comedian Sarah Silverman joined two others in suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement. Silverman and the other plaintiffs have accused OpenAI and Meta of training their AI models using their content without their permission. Google was hit with one similar class action suit which accuses the company of “secretly stealing everything created and shared on the Internet” and using it to train its AI chatbots.
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The legal battle between publishers and tech giants comes amid an effort by the Biden administration to establish guardrails to regulate AI. Last week, the White House announced that it had received “voluntary” commitments from seven companies — Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Anthropic and Inflection AI — “to help advance the safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology.” The commitments made by these companies focused on “safety, security and trust”, addressing concerns such as bias, misinformation and privacy. The compromises, however, lacked any details on the compensation of the data sources used to train these AI systems.
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