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This week in AI, music labels are suing two AI-powered music generator startups, Udio and Suno, for copyright infringement.
The RIAA, the trade group representing the US music recording industry, announced the lawsuit on Monday, filed by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Records and others. The suit claims that Udio and Suno trained the generative AI models underlying their platforms on labels’ music but failed to compensate the labels, and seeks $150,000 in damages for each allegedly infringing work.
“Synthetic musical output could saturate the market with machine-generated content and directly compete with, devalue and ultimately drown out the authentic voice recordings on which the Service is based,” the record companies said in their complaint.
These lawsuits join a growing number against generative AI vendors, including big names like OpenAI, that make broadly similar claims: that companies that train on copyrighted works must pay or at least credit rightsholders, and that rightsholders must be able to opt out of training if they wish. Vendors have long asserted fair use protections, arguing that the copyrighted data they use for training is publicly available and that their models create transformative works, not plagiarism.
So, what will the court rule? Well, dear reader, this is a billion-dollar question and one that will take a long time to resolve.
For copyright holders, this would be considered a major win. attachment evidence The generative AI model is almost (emphasis added) Almost) learns verbatim from copyrighted works of art, books, songs, etc. that it trains on. But generative AI vendors have been lucky enough to avoid punishment in some cases, thanks to Google, which set an important precedent.
More than a decade ago, Google began scanning millions of books to build an archive for Google Books, a sort of search engine for literary content. Authors and publishers sued Google over this practice, arguing that reproducing their intellectual property online amounted to infringement. But they lost the case. On appeal, the court ruled that Google Books’ copying had a “very compelling transformative purpose.”
If plaintiffs cannot prove that the vendors’ models are in fact plagiarism on a large scale, courts may find that generative AI also has a “very compelling transformative purpose.” Or, as The Atlantic’s Alex Reisner puts it, suggestThere may never be a single ruling on whether an entire generative AI technology infringes: judges are likely to decide the winner on a case-by-case, model-by-model basis, taking into account each generated output.
As my colleague Devin Caldway succinctly put it in an article this week, “Not all AI companies are so free to leave their traces at the scene of a crime,” and as the litigation progresses, AI vendors whose business models depend on the outcome will no doubt be taking detailed notes.
news
Advanced Audio Mode Delay: OpenAI has delayed the release of Advanced Voice Mode, an eerily realistic, near-real-time conversational experience for its AI-powered chatbot platform ChatGPT. But OpenAI has no free time: This week the company acquired remote collaboration startup Multi and released a macOS client for all ChatGPT users.
Stability is a lifeline: Stability AI, developer of the financially struggling open image generation model Stable Diffusion, has been rescued by a group of investors including Napster founder Sean Parker and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. With its debt forgiven, the company has appointed former Weta Digital head Prem Akkaraju as its new CEO as part of a broader effort to reposition itself in the highly competitive AI industry.
Gemini comes to Gmail: Google is introducing a new Gemini-powered AI side panel to Gmail that helps you compose emails and summarize threads. The same side panel will also be coming to the rest of the search giant’s suite of productivity apps, namely Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive.
Great Curators: Goodreads co-founder Otis Chandler launched Smashing, an AI and community-powered content recommendation app that aims to connect users with their interests by surfacing the hidden treasures of the internet. Smashing provides news summaries, key excerpts, and interesting quotes, automatically identifying topics and threads that interest individual users, and encouraging them to like, save, and comment on articles.
Apple says no to Meta’s AI: A few days later The Wall Street Journal Apple and Meta are reportedly in talks to integrate the latter’s AI models. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman The iPhone maker said it had no plans to make such a move. According to Bloomberg, Apple had shelved plans to put Meta’s AI on iPhones due to privacy concerns and the perception of partnering with a social network whose privacy policies have often been criticized.
Research Paper of the Week
Beware of Russian-influenced chatbots, they could be right in your neighborhood.
Earlier this month, Axios study An investigation by anti-misinformation organization NewsGuard found that a major AI chatbot was spitting out snippets of a Russian propaganda campaign.
NewsGuard fed 10 leading chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, dozens of prompts asking about Russian propaganda, specifically stories allegedly created by American fugitive John Mark Duggan. The company said the chatbots responded with disinformation 32% of the time, presenting false reports written by Russians as fact.
The study highlights the increased scrutiny coming into AI vendors as the U.S. election season approaches. Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and many other major AI companies agreed at the Munich Security Conference in February to take steps to curb the spread of deepfakes and election-related misinformation. But abuse of their platforms remains rampant.
“This report illustrates why the industry must pay special attention to news and information,” NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill told Axios. “For now, you shouldn’t trust the answers most of these chatbots provide when it comes to news-related issues, especially controversial ones.”
Model of the Week
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) claim to have developed a model, DenseAV, that can learn language by predicting what it sees from what it hears, and vice versa.
The researchers, led by Mark Hamilton, a doctoral student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, developed DenseAV because they were inspired by the non-verbal ways animals communicate. “We thought that maybe to learn language, you need to use audio and video,” he said in an interview at MIT CSAIL. Press Office“How can we get an algorithm to watch TV all day and then understand what we’re talking about?”
DenseAV works with only two types of data, audio and visual, and processes them separately, “learning” by comparing pairs of audio and visual signals to determine which signals match and which don’t. Trained on a dataset of 2 million YouTube videos, DenseAV can identify objects from their names and sounds by finding and aggregating all possible matches between pixels in audio clips and images.
For example, if DenseAV hears a dog barking, one part of the model will focus on language, such as the word “dog,” while another part will focus on the dog’s bark. The researchers say this shows that DenseAV can not only learn the meaning of words and the location of sounds, but also learn to distinguish between these “cross-modal” connections.
Going forward, the team aims to create a system that can learn from vast amounts of video- or audio-only data, scale up their work with larger models, and integrate it with knowledge from language understanding models to improve performance.
Grab Bag
No one can blame OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Not always forthright.
Speaking at a conference at Dartmouth College’s School of Engineering, Murati acknowledged that generative AI will indeed eliminate some creative jobs, but suggested that those jobs “maybe shouldn’t exist in the first place.”
“I certainly expect that we will see a lot of jobs change, some jobs will be lost, and some new jobs will be created,” she continued. “The truth is, we still don’t know very much about how AI will affect jobs.”
Creators weren’t pleased with Murati’s comments, and rightly so: Callous rhetoric aside, OpenAI, like Udio and Suno, has faced lawsuits, criticism, and regulatory complaints for profiting from artists’ work without paying them.
OpenAI has recently promised to release tools to give creators more control over how their work is used in its products, and it continues to strike licensing deals with copyright holders and publishers, but the company isn’t working to advance universal basic income or spearhead any meaningful efforts to reskill or upskill the workforce its technology impacts.
Recent piece Contract jobs that require basic writing, coding and translation are disappearing, according to the Wall Street Journal. And study A study published last November found that freelancers saw a decline in work and a significant drop in income following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
OpenAI’s stated mission is at least that Commercial enterpriseThe goal of OpenAI is to “ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) — artificial intelligence systems that are typically smarter than humans — benefits all of humanity.” AGI isn’t here yet, but wouldn’t it be commendable if OpenAI stuck to the “benefiting all of humanity” part and kept even a small portion of the revenue?Over $3.4 billionCould there be SEC or other regulation of payments to creators so that they aren’t swamped by the deluge of generative AI?
One can dream, right?