The billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, the Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, the actors Kevin Bacon and Julianne Moore, and the author Kazuo Ishiguro. This week, they began a couple of public fights with artificial intelligence companies, accusing them of using their intellectual property without permission to build the increasingly powerful and lucrative new technology.
More than 13,000 creative professionals from the worlds of literature, music, film, theatre and television released a statement warning that AI firms training programs such as ChatGPT on their works without a license posed a “major, unjust threat” to their livelihoods. By the end of the week, that number had almost doubled to 25,000.
It came a day after Murdoch, owner of the publishing group News Corp, whose newspapers include the Wall Street Journal, the Sun, the Times and the Australian, launched a legal action against the AI-powered search engine Perplexity and accused it of “illegally copying” some of his US titles’ journalism.
The stars’ statement is a concerted effort to challenge the idea that creative works can be used as training data without recompense on the grounds of “fair use,” a US legal term meaning permission from the copyright owner is not needed. Adding to their anger is the fact these AI models can then be used to produce fresh works that compete with those of human beings.
AI was a key sticking point in last year’s dual strikes by Hollywood actors and writers, which secured agreements to ensure the new technology stays in the control of workers, rather than being used to replace them. Several ongoing legal cases are likely to decide whether the copyright battle will be similarly successful.
In the US, artists are also suing tech firms behind image generators, major record labels are suing AI music creators Suno and Udio, and a group of authors including John Grisham and George RR Martin are suing ChatGPT developer OpenAI for alleged breach of copyright.
In the battle to get AI companies to pay for the content they are scraping to build their tools, publishers are also pursuing legal avenues to get them to the negotiating table to sign licensing deals.
Several publishers, including Axel Springer (owner of Politico), Condé Nast (publisher of Vogue), the Financial Times, and Reuters, have established content agreements with various AI companies. In May, News Corp signed a five-year deal with OpenAI, reportedly valued at $250 million. In contrast, the New York Times has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and recently sent a “cease and desist” letter to Perplexity.
In the UK, AI companies are advocating for changes in the law that would allow them to continue developing their tools without the risk of infringing intellectual property rights. Currently, the text and data mining necessary to train generative AI tools is only permitted for research purposes and not for commercial use.
