The American Matthew Butterick has started a legal crusade against generative artificial intelligence (AI). In 2022, he filed the first lawsuit in the history of this field against Microsoft, one of the companies that develop these types of tools (GitHub Copilot). Today, he’s coordinating four class action lawsuits that bring together complaints filed by programmers, artists and writers.
If successful, he could force the companies responsible for applications such as ChatGPT or Midjourney to compensate thousands of creators. They may even have to retire their algorithms and retrain them with databases that don’t infringe on intellectual property rights.
This is a very simplified narrative if I may say so. I’d argue there is no such thing as an artificial ‘mind.’ What you call mind is a stochastic parrot. Whatever the bot yields, its whole work is being copied, because that’s the point of training a foundation model.
The copyright laws in our current forms can’t simply be applied here. I’m not a laywer and can’t elaborate how we should address the issue legally, but the models’ results are 100 percent copied. There can be no doubt. There’s no mind that has created anything original.