AI Revolution Brewing: Strikes, Investiations and Court Cases Signal a Bigger Fight ahead

Tuesday - July 18 2023, 17:13 UTC - 1 year ago

AI Revolution is brewing due to Hollywood’s union for actors going on strike, joining a writers’ strike already in progress; companies have been exploiting and launching harmful products. The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation as well as litigation brought up against several companies. This may result in licensing and royalties for the use of work as training data for AI models, and deciding how powerful private companies are able to be. Bill Gates weighs in on the question of risk due to AI and determines it is not too worrisome.

There’s an AI revolution brewing. Last week, Hollywood’s union for actors went on strike, joining a writers’ strike already in progress—the first time these unions have been on strike simultaneously in six decades. Artificial intelligence has become a big bone of contention for creatives.

What connects these cases is a fear that humans will be replaced by computer programs, and a feeling that there’s very little we can do about it. No wonder. Our lax approach to regulating the excesses of the previous tech boom means AI companies have felt safe building and launching products that are exploitative and harmful.I just published a story looking at the flood of lawsuits and investigations that have hit those companies recently. These lawsuits are likely to be very influential in ensuring that the way AI is developed and used in the future is more equitable and fair. Read it here.The gist is that last week, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into whether OpenAI violated consumer protection laws by scraping people’s online data to train its popular AI chatbot ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, artists, authors, and the image company Getty are suing AI companies such as OpenAI, Stability AI, and Meta, alleging that they broke copyright laws by training their models on their work without providing any recognition or payment. Last week comedian and author Sarah Silverman joined the authors’ copyright fight against AI companies.

Both the FTC investigation and the slew of lawsuits revolve around AI’s data practices, which rely on hoovering the internet for data to train models. This inevitably includes personal data as well as copyrighted works.

These cases will essentially determine how AI companies are legally allowed to behave,says Matthew Butterick, a lawyer who represents artists and authors, including Silverman, in class actions against GitHub and Microsoft, OpenAI, Stability AI, and Meta.

Strikes, investigations, and court cases could also help pave the way for artists, actors, authors, and others to be compensated, through a system of licensing and royalties, for the use of their work as training data for AI models.

But to me, these court cases are a sign of a bigger fight we are starting as a society. They will help determine how much power we are comfortable giving private companies, and how much agency we are going to have in this brave new AI-powered world.

I think that’s something worth fighting for.

Deeper Learning .

Bill Gates has joined the chorus of big names in tech who have weighed in on the question of risk around artificial intelligence. TL;DR? He’s not too worried—we’ve been here before.

Bits and Bytes .