The activist who’s taking on artificial intelligence in the courts: ‘This is the fight of our lives’
The activist who’s taking on artificial intelligence in the courts: ‘This is the fight of our lives’
Matthew Butterick is leading a series of lawsuits against firms such as Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta. He is seeking to defend the copyrights of artists, writers and programmers
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.
I don't see the US restricting AI development. No matter what is morally right or wrong, this is strategically important, and they won't kneecap themselves in the global competition.
27Luddites smashing power looms.
23It's worth remembering that the Luddites were not against technology. They were against technology that replaced workers, without compensating them for the loss, so the owners of the technology could profit.
45Moreover, Luddites were opposed to the replacement of independent at-home workers by oppressed factory child labourers. Much like OpenAI aims to replace creative professionals by an army of precarious poorly paid microworkers.
32Their 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.
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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.
They will readily agree to this after having made their money and use their ill gotten gains to train a new model. The rest of us will have to go pound sand as making a new model will have been made prohibitively expensive. Good intentions, but it will only help them by pulling up the ladder behind them.
15It wouldn't be pulling up the ladder behind them if we force them to step down that ladder and burn it by retraining their models from scratch "with databases that don't infringe on intellectual property rights".
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I’m an artist and I can guarantee his lawsuits will jack squat for people like me. In fact, if successful, it will likely hurt artists trying to adapt to AI. Let’s be serious here, copyright doesn’t really protect artists, it’s a club for corporations to swing around to control our culture. AI isn’t the problem, capitalism is.
8Dumbass. YouTube has single-handedly proven how broken the copyright system is and this dick wants to make it worse. There needs to be a fair-er rebalancing of how people are compensated and for how long.
What exactly that looks like I'm not sure but I do know that upholding the current system is not the answer.
1Not going to happen, buddy.
The fundamental purpose of copyright is to promote Science and the Useful Arts. The purpose is to expand our collective body of knowledge; to increase our collective intelligence.
It is impossible to infringe on copyright by reading a book. Even if the book was illegally produced and distributed, the act of reading it is not a copyright violation. A natural mind cannot be denied access to published information through copyright law.
That natural mind is restricted by not being allowed to produce or distribute a copy or a derivative work, but knowledge of the work and inspiration from that work are not restricted by copyright or patent law. Copyright exists specifically to promote providing knowledge to that mind.
Blocking the development of an artificial mind fundamentally breaks the purpose for which copyright exists.
1This is a very simplified narrative if I may say so. I'd argue there is no such thing as an artificial 'mind.' What you call mind is a stochastic parrot. Whatever the bot yields, its whole work is being copied, because that’s the point of training a foundation model.
The copyright laws in our current forms can't simply be applied here. I'm not a laywer and can't elaborate how we should address the issue legally, but the models' results are 100 percent copied. There can be no doubt. There's no mind that has created anything original.
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