AI Needs Your Data and It Needs it Badly

Item 1 – Apple is reported to be in negotiations with news companies and other publishers (like NBC and Conde Nast) to “license” their back catalog of content for their AI projects. Apple is offering, supposedly, up to $50 million to license their content, but, at least for now, the content creators were not fans of Apple’s terms.

One of Apple’s proposed terms that the publishers would be liable for any lawsuits from Apple’s use of the content.

Item 2 – The New York Times has filed a complaint with SDNY – the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. SDNY has a reputation for tech savviness that few other law teams can match and they have taken down a lot of big guns. The Times says that Open AI / Microsoft AI tools can generate content that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, depriving the Times of revenue and potentially damaging its reputation.

Item 3 – Besides asking for monetary damages, the Times is asking that Open AI / Microsoft removes the Times’ content from their datasets (which I think is pretty close to impossible).

Item 4- The European Commissioner for Competition defended the proposed EU AI Act as providing legal certainty for EU companies developing AI tools, but others suggest that the law will just tie EU companies hands behind their back while the rest of the world leaves the EU in the dust and some companies will just move out of the EU, taking jobs and revenue with them and making the law mostly meaningless.

Item 5 – Google asked a California federal court to dismiss a proposed class action lawsuit that says that the company’s scraping of data to train their AI violates millions of people’s privacy and property rights. Google said that the use of people’s data is necessary to train their systems.

Item 6 – The Supremes – the group of elderly lawyers who are not terribly tech savvy and who have publicly admitted that – are going to have to sort this out over the next few years. That is going to be interesting. It is completely unclear how that might turn out.

The AI world is following Silicon Valley’s mantra – move fast and break things. It will be interesting to see if the legal system can keep up. It is going to be a race and the legal system does not have a reputation for moving fast.

Credit: Steptoe & Johnson, Reuters and Venture Beat

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