Pasquale and Sun highlight legal challenges faced by AI, particularly regarding the use of copyrighted data for training AI models and the uncertainty surrounding its legality. They argue that current laws are ill-suited to address these issues and that legislators need to articulate a new vision for balancing rights and responsibilities2. The uncompensated harvesting of creative works poses a threat to creators and generative AI itself, potentially leading to decreased availability of training data.
AI's use of content can affect creators economically by potentially devaluing their work and reducing their income. As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent and accessible, it may lead to increased competition and a shift in the balance of supply and demand. This could result in lower rates for content creation, impacting the livelihoods of creators and potentially discouraging the production of original, high-quality content.
Prior to this lawsuit, OpenAI and Microsoft faced at least one other class action lawsuit in San Francisco federal court for allegedly violating several privacy laws in developing OpenAI's popular chatbot, ChatGPT. Additionally, in April, eight newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged content misappropriation, and the New York Times sued four months earlier. In January, two authors sued OpenAI and Microsoft for training AI models on their works without permission. Furthermore, in 2022, several unidentified developers sued OpenAI and GitHub for allegedly using publicly posted programming code to train generative models in violation of software licensing terms.