According to the News Media Alliance (NMA), artificial intelligence (AI) developers are using copyrighted news content without permission to train their models, which infringes on copyright and puts news outlets in competition with AI models. The NMA claims that AI models use significantly more news publisher content compared to other sources. This practice rewards AI developers with users, data, brand creation, and advertising dollars, while news publishers face reduced revenues, employment opportunities, and tarnished relationships with viewers. To address this issue, the NMA recommends that the Copyright Office declares using a publication’s content to monetize AI systems as harmful to publishers and calls for licensing models and transparency measures to restrict the use of copyrighted materials. The NMA also suggests adopting measures to remove protected content from third-party websites.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude have gained popularity in the last year, but their training methods have faced copyright infringement claims in court. Comedian Sarah Silverman sued OpenAI and Meta for using her copyrighted work without permission to train their AI systems. Google and OpenAI have also been hit with separate class-action lawsuits over allegations of scraping private user information from the internet. While Google has assumed legal responsibility for copyright infringement claims related to its generative AI products on Google Cloud and Workspace, its Bard search tool is not covered by this protection.
