At last, it seems the law recognizes that AI synthesizes, not copies

OpenAI, and by proxy, generative AI as a whole, has won the first round of the court fight brought by Raw Story Media Inc. and Alternet Media Inc. over the use of its data in algorithm training.

The two companies, which run news sites, had sued OpenAI in February for copyright infringement after having used thousands of articles on their pages to train ChatGPT. According to the companies, the chatbot reproduced its copyrighted material in a “verbatim or near-verbatim” manner.

The lawsuits accused OpenAI of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by removing copyright-identifying information, such as authors’ names and titles, to facilitate infringement, and asked the court for monetary damages of at least $2,500 for each violation and an order that would force OpenAI to stop using its content.

Judge Colleen McMahon’s response? The harm cited by the outlets is “not the type of harm that has been elevated” to a level that would justify the lawsuit. McMahon agreed with OpenAI that the claims should be dismissed.The litigants can raise it again, but in principle, the outcome of this first battle favors OpenAI.

The bottom line? Generative AI synthesizes, not copies. It works like our brains: we see, hear and read things, but our memory does…