OpenAI and other companies in the generative AI space continue to develop and debut innovations at a rapid pace. But this AI craze is also sparking new legal battles.
The creators of ChatGPT have been hit with several new lawsuits over copyright infringement and other concerns, with some accusing them of putting profit over purpose. Last week, OpenAI was named as a defendant in a lawsuit jointly filed by The Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet, alleging that they violated copyright laws by using their content to train AI models. The next day, OpenAI and Altman were named in a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk, who claims that Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman founded the nonprofit nearly 10 years ago. The lawsuit alleges that he violated a contract he signed with Musk when he co-founded the group. According to the complaint, OpenAI abandoned its nonprofit mission by pursuing business deals that could betray public interest AI research.
“Mr. Musk has known it for a long time. [artificial general intelligence] According to the complaint, this poses a grave threat to humanity, perhaps the greatest existential threat facing us today. “His concerns echoed those raised before him by such luminaries as Stephen Hawking and Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy. It is based on the fact that machines solve almost every task better than we can, and then they are more economically useful than us. ”
The legal battle will play out in the same way many other lawsuits are already underway. For example, OpenAI is also fighting numerous lawsuits from the New York Times, the Writers Guild, and various authors.
Regulators also continued to put pressure on OpenAI and other generative AI companies. For example, the FTC recently opened a new investigation into the relationships between big tech giants and the AI startups they’ve invested in. The deal is also under scrutiny in Europe, including new investments by the European Union, which is investigating Microsoft’s recent investments. With Mistral AI. Meanwhile, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority announced in December that the watchdog was investigating whether Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI would impact competition. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is also investigating OpenAI to determine whether the startup has misled investors, according to a report last week.
Taken together, the multi-pronged pressures represent a myriad of challenges for companies wanting to use or build generative AI tools. AI was also featured in Supreme Court hearings last week in two cases related to social media moderation. And while the discussion wasn’t focused on generative AI, it provides insight into how the nation’s highest court is thinking about algorithms in a momentous year.
Another question that needs to be asked (and eventually answered): Just as platforms are currently protected from liability for the content on their platforms, generative AI is protected under the Communications Decency Act. Is it protected by Section 230?
More AI news from DIGIDAY
- IPG is integrating Adobe’s generative AI tools into its new marketing platform to help automate and scale content creation.
- Newsguard has debuted a new platform to track election-related misinformation. This will be aided by new automation tools built by NewsGuard and external partners.
Prompts and products: More AI news and announcements
- AI-generated ads were used to promote a new Willy Wonka pop-up in Scotland, but attendees were less than impressed. Some said the difference between the image and reality felt like false advertising.
- Mucinex has released a new game called “Mucus Masher” using AI-generated images from Getty Images.
- Vimeo has debuted a new AI-powered hub called Vimeo Central. It helps users create and edit videos using AI, condense long videos into short highlights and summaries, and ask questions to videos to get more attention.
- Klarna said its new AI assistant can handle as many customer conversations as 700 full-time human agents. Powered by OpenAI technology, the assistant handled more than 2 million conversations in its first month. This accounted for his two-thirds of Klarna’s total volume.
- MKHSTRY, the marketing collective founded by former Progressive CMO Jeff Charney, is debuting a new AI platform called MKHSTRY AI. It aims to help marketers with everything from ideation and strategy to content creation.
- Enterprise AI startup Writer has debuted Palmyra-Vision, a new multimodal large-scale language model with vision capabilities to read handwritten text, classify objects and colors, and describe graphs.
- Salesforce debuted Einstein Copilot, an AI assistant designed to help with CRM-related tasks. Meanwhile, Adobe said it is developing generative AI tools for audio creation and editing. Another of his debuts is his GoDaddy, which sells his new generative AI tool called Airo to help small and medium-sized businesses design their websites, emails, and other content.
Words From Humans: Quotes from last week’s interview
- “When you think about AI-generated content and AI workloads, most of it is in the cloud. That raises concerns about latency, security, and privacy. So we overcome that by bringing it down locally. I have [with on-device AI]Needless to say [reducing] running cost. – Tom Butler, Executive Director, Worldwide Commercial Portfolio and Product Management, Lenovo
- “As cameras got cheaper, more people started getting their hands on cameras. That doesn’t mean anyone can make an Oscar-winning movie now. Be professional and creative. We still need that, and I think AI and these kinds of tools are going to push the boundaries of what creativity means and what originality means.” – Zohar Dayan, SVP of Products, Vimeo
- “The good news about building a modern ad tech stack now that platform change is happening is that you just need to build with the new stuff that’s out there.” [such as AI]. So, for example, our small businesses can use generative AI to create copies. I like this because it saves me time and is much more efficient. ” – Sarah Friar, Nextdoor CEO
