The brain that wrote your favorite novel consumed Dickens and Austen, Pynchon and Didion. The brain that wrote this article devoured Bradbury and Orwell, Ishiguro and Octavia Butler. But the “brain” that powers that chatbot you played around with over the weekendCopyright law is well equipped to differentiate between slightly derivative human ingenuity and reductive copycatting.
In its complaint, Reuters alleged that Ross tried to license Westlaw’s legal summaries—called headnotes—to train an A.I.–powered legal search engine. When Reuters refused to do that, Ross contracted with a third-party firm to scrape them off Westlaw. Reuters argues that Ross’ product was simply “headnotes with question marks at the end,” as the
That element of direct competition was decisive in the most recent Supreme Court battle over fair use, in which the court ruled thaton photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s copyright when he made silk-screen versions of her photograph of Prince. The reason: His foundation was directly competing against the original by licensing it to magazines. “Thomson Reuters is going to press very hard on that, and that’s what all of the plaintiffs in the generative A.I.
“The worst outcome would be that you lose and that the relief is you have to destroy your model and start all over again,” Brauneis said. “The way these models are generated, there’s no way that, say, GPT-4, there’s no way you can go back and filter out the plaintiff’s content from the model that you generated. I think every computer scientist agrees that is not currently possible with the way these models are being built.