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.
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.
It should be prohibitively expensive for anyone to steal from regular people, whether it’s big companies or other regular people. I’m not more enthusiastic about the idea of people stealing from artists to create open source AIs than I am when corporations do it. For an open source AI to be worth the name, it would have to use only open source training data - ie, stuff that is in the public domain or has been specifically had an open source licence assigned to it. If the creator hasn’t said they’re okay with their content being used for AI training, then it’s not valid for use in an open source AI.
I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF if you haven’t already. The EFF is a digital rights group who most recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
People are trying to conjour up new rights to take another piece of the public’s right and access to information. To fashion themselves as new owner class. Artists and everyone else should accept that others have the same rights as they do, and they can’t now take those opportunities from other people because it’s their turn now.
There’s already a model trained on just Creative Commons licensed data, but you don’t see them promoting it. That’s because it was not about the data, it’s an attack on their status, and when asked about generators that didn’t use their art, they came out overwhelmingly against with the same condescending and reductive takes they’ve been using this whole time.
I believe that generative art, warts and all, is a vital new form of art that is shaking things up, challenging preconceptions, and getting people angry - just like art should.