IIt’s an unlikely alliance between billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and a group of top artists including Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, actors Kevin Bacon and Julianne Moore, and author Kazuo Ishiguro.

This week they launched two very public battles with artificial intelligence companies, accusing them of using their intellectual property without permission to build increasingly powerful and lucrative new technologies.

More than 13,000 creative professionals from the worlds of literature, music, film, theater and television have issued a statement saying that programs such as ChatGPT, where AI companies train their work without permission, are interfering with their lives. It warned that it posed a “serious and unwarranted threat”. By the end of the week, that number had nearly doubled to 25,000.

This comes as Murdoch, the owner of News Corp., a publishing group that owns the Wall Street Journal, The Sun, The Times, The Australian, and others, has warned Perplexity, an AI-based search engine, of illegal activities. This was the day after the company filed a lawsuit alleging that Some of his journalism in the US title has been copied.

The Stars’ statement supports the idea that creative works can be used as training data for free on grounds of “fair use” (a US legal term meaning no permission from the copyright owner is required). It is a collective effort to dissent. Adding to their ire is the fact that these AI models can be used to produce fresh work that competes with human work.

AI was a major sticking point in last year’s double strike by Hollywood actors and screenwriters, who agreed to ensure new technology remains under the control of employees rather than being used to replace them. Secured. Several ongoing lawsuits could determine whether the copyright battle is similarly successful.

In the US, artists are suing the tech companies behind the image-generating devices, a major record label is suing AI music creators Suno and Udio, and a group of writers including John Grisham and George R.R. Martin is suing ChatGPT developer OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement.

In the fight to make AI companies pay for the content they scrape to build their tools, publishers are also pursuing legal avenues to get them to the negotiating table to sign licensing agreements. There is.

Publishers such as Politico owner Axel Springer, Vogue’s Condé Nast, the Financial Times and Reuters have signed content deals with various AI companies, and in May, News Corp. has signed a five-year contract with Open AI, reportedly worth $250 million. In contrast, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against the creators of ChatGPT and sent a “cease and desist” letter to Perplexity last week.

But in the UK, AI companies are lobbying for legal changes to allow them to continue developing tools without the risk of infringing intellectual property rights. Currently, the text and data mining required to train generative AI tools is only permitted for non-commercial research.

This week, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called for a rethink of what “fair use” is. He argued that the large-scale language models that power generative AI do not “regurgitate” the information they have been trained on, and that this would be considered copyright infringement.

Labour’s new minister for AI and digital government, Ferial Clarke, recently said she wants copyright disputes between creative industries and AI companies to be resolved by the end of the year.

she said it might be in there
Form of amendment to existing or new law
opening up the possibility of new provisions allowing AI companies to collect data for commercial purposes.

While news organizations publicly oppose AI-based content abuse, behind the scenes many are adopting technology to replace editorial functions, with commercially-strapped publishers using the technology at a cost. There is growing fear among staff that they will be used as a Trojan horse to enable retrenchment and redundancies.

Last month, the National Union of Journalists launched a campaign to highlight the issue.
“Journalism before algorithms”.

“With wage stagnation, below-inflation wage increases, newsroom staff shortages, and increasing layoffs, there is a need to consider the use of AI,” the paper said. “Threats to journalists’ jobs are considered top of mind… AI is no substitute for real journalism.”

“There are questions about how much publishers themselves are using these tools,” said Niamh Burns, senior research analyst at Enders Analysis. “I think the amount of adoption is low, and there’s a lot of experimentation going on, but I can see a world where publishers are using some of these tools heavily. We need to be realistic about the scale of the opportunity we create.”

Burns said that so far, publishers’ willingness to use AI tools to directly influence or create editorial content has largely depended on how commercially pressurized the media landscape is for their operators. He said that it is related to whether the

BuzzFeed’s once-mighty market value has fallen from $1 billion during its 2021 flotation to less than $100 million.
Rapid AI adapter Against the backdrop of drastic cuts in the news department and sharp decline in income.

And Newsquest, the second-largest newspaper in Britain’s beleaguered local and regional newspaper market, has embarked on initiatives such as rapidly increasing the role of “AI-assisted” journalism.

However, quality national newspapers and media brands remain very cautious, and many, including the Guardian, have set strict principles to guide their work.

But behind the scenes, AI tools are being leveraged to help categorize large datasets and help journalists report on new and exclusive content.

“I think the media companies that are most exposed to commercial risk in the short term are also at risk of overreaching,” Burns said.

“A lot of it has to do with commercial models, where you rely on advertising from a lot of traffic on social platforms and all you need is scale and not quality, where AI can be very helpful.

“But creating generative AI content is never worth the cost or risk.” [for quality national titles]. And for any publisher, producing more conventional journalism comes with long-term costs to quality and risks to competitiveness. ”