Its approach differs from that of other Western countries. While the EU is trying to forestall the worst AI harms proactively, the American approach is more reactive. The US waits for harms to emerge first before regulating, says Amir Ghavi, a partner on the law firm Fried Frank. Ghavi is representing Stability AI, the corporate behind the open-source image-generating AI Stable Diffusion, in three copyright lawsuits. 

“That’s a pro-capitalist stance,” Ghavi says. “It fosters innovation. It gives creators and inventors the liberty to be a bit more daring in imagining latest solutions.” 

The category motion lawsuits over copyright and privacy could shed more light on how “black box” AI algorithms work and create latest ways for artists and authors to be compensated for having their work utilized in AI models, say Joseph Saveri, the founding father of an antitrust and sophistication motion law firm, and Matthew Butterick, a lawyer. 

They’re leading the suits against GitHub and Microsoft, OpenAI, Stability AI, and Meta. Saveri and Butterick represent Silverman, a part of a bunch of authors who claim that the tech corporations trained their language models on their copyrighted books. Generative AI models are trained using vast data sets of images and text scraped from the web. This inevitably includes copyrighted data. Authors, artists, and programmers say tech corporations which have scraped their mental property without consent or attribution should compensate them. 

“There’s a void where there’s no rule of law yet, and we’re bringing the law where it must go,” says Butterick. While the AI technologies at issue within the suits could also be latest, the legal questions around them will not be, and the team is counting on “good quaint” copyright law, he adds. 

Butterick and Saveri point to Napster, the peer-to-peer music sharing system, for instance. The corporate was sued by record corporations for copyright infringement, and it led to a landmark case on the fair use of music. 

The Napster settlement cleared the best way for corporations like Apple, Spotify, and others to begin creating latest license-based deals, says Butterick. The pair is hoping their lawsuits, too, will clear the best way for a licensing solution where artists, writers, and other copyright holders is also paid royalties for having their content utilized in an AI model, much like the system in place within the music industry for sampling songs. Corporations would also must ask for explicit permission to make use of copyrighted content in training sets. 

Tech corporations have treated publicly available copyrighted data on the web as subject to “fair use” under US copyright law, which might allow them to make use of it without asking for permission first. Copyright holders disagree. The category actions will likely determine who is correct, says Ghavi.