The activist who’s taking on artificial intelligence in the courts: ‘This is the fight of our lives’

Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨tardigrada@beehaw.org⁩ to ⁨technology@beehaw.org⁩

https://english.elpais.com/technology/2024-01-04/the-activist-whos-taking-on-artificial-intelligence-in-the-courts-this-is-the-fight-of-our-lives.html

The American Matthew Butterick has started a legal crusade against generative artificial intelligence (AI). In 2022, he filed the first lawsuit in the history of this field against Microsoft, one of the companies that develop these types of tools (GitHub Copilot). Today, he’s coordinating four class action lawsuits that bring together complaints filed by programmers, artists and writers.

If successful, he could force the companies responsible for applications such as ChatGPT or Midjourney to compensate thousands of creators. They may even have to retire their algorithms and retrain them with databases that don’t infringe on intellectual property rights.

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realharo@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t see the US restricting AI development. No matter what is morally right or wrong, this is strategically important, and they won’t kneecap themselves in the global competition.

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- anachronist@midwest.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Strategically important how exactly?
  
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  - WebTheWitted@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Great power competition / military industrial complex . AI is a pretty vague term, but practically it could be used to describe drone swarming technology, cyber warfare, etc.
    
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RobotToaster@mander.xyz ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Luddites smashing power looms.

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- frog@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s worth remembering that the Luddites were not against technology. They were against technology that replaced workers, without compensating them for the loss, so the owners of the technology could profit.
  
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  - luciole@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Moreover, Luddites were opposed to the replacement of independent at-home workers by oppressed factory child labourers. Much like OpenAI aims to replace creative professionals by an army of precarious poorly paid microworkers.
    
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  - Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Their problem was that they smashed too many looms and not enough capitalists. AI training isn’t just for big corporations. We shouldn’t applaud people that put up barriers that will make it prohibitively expensive to for regular people to keep up. This will only help the rich and give corporations control over a public technology.
    
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moon_matter@kbin.social ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They will readily agree to this after having made their money and use their ill gotten gains to train a new model. The rest of us will have to go pound sand as making a new model will have been made prohibitively expensive. Good intentions, but it will only help them by pulling up the ladder behind them.

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- radix@lemm.ee ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It wouldn’t be pulling up the ladder behind them if we force them to step down that ladder and burn it by retraining their models from scratch “with databases that don’t infringe on intellectual property rights”.
  
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darkphotonstudio@beehaw.org ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I’m an artist and I can guarantee his lawsuits will jack squat for people like me. In fact, if successful, it will likely hurt artists trying to adapt to AI. Let’s be serious here, copyright doesn’t really protect artists, it’s a club for corporations to swing around to control our culture. AI isn’t the problem, capitalism is.

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onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Maybe licensing comments isn’t that crazy, aye? 😉

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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ky56@aussie.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Dumbass. YouTube has single-handedly proven how broken the copyright system is and this dick want to make it worse. There need to be a fair-er rebalancing of how people are compensated and for how long.

What exactly that looks like I’m not sure but I do know that upholding the current system is not the answer.

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