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AI’s Billion-Dollar Copyright Oversight
The party might be over for AI’s free ride on creative content
I’ve grappled with this for a while. I thought I had made up my mind about AI, but that changed this morning.
Until now, my stance was that AI companies were not stealing content. I saw their use of it to train models as fair use. But an article by Kathryn Hulick articulated how some AI developers steal art in a way that made me see things differently.
I was already aware that AI could be used to plagiarize. What surprised me is how easily it can happen unintentionally. I naively thought that as long as an AI user avoids adding a specific creator’s style or character to their prompt, the generator would output something new. However, that’s not always the case. It’s way easier than I realized to infringe without meaning to.
AI’s Hidden Infringement Trap
While experimenting on Dalle-3 and Midjourney, Reid Southen and Gary Marcus discovered that inputting the prompt “videogame hedgehog” led to both models generating images that looked suspiciously close to Sonic the Hedgehog. They also tested simple prompts like “screencap,” which led to outputs from popular films like Frozen, Spiderman, and Star Wars.
