Photo Credit: Growtika
With multiple ongoing lawsuits against several AI companies in the United States alone, creatives are taking a stance against their works being used as training data for large language models (LLMs) and more.
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the government has said it would like to change copyright law and allow these AI companies to train on copyrighted works without a license in place. The Human Artistry Campaign has organized a petition that has been signed by more than 11,500+ actors, artists, authors, musicians, and organizations against this move.
The petition reads, “The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works and must not be permitted.”
Thom Yorke, Björn Ulvaeus, Max Richter, and Billy Bragg are just a few of the top creatives who have signed the petition, urging more guardrails for AI training. They’ve joined the Human Artistry Campaign in seeking the advancement of responsible AI, working to ensure AI is developed in ways that strengthen the creative ecosystem rather than gutting it.
In the United States, OpenAI, Anthropic, and now Perplexity are some of the major tech companies facing lawsuits over their use of copyrighted works in their training data. Anthropic has argued that this constitutes a ‘fair use’ in current copyright law—a defense which will be tested in court soon.
The owners of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post recently launched a lawsuit against Perplexity for copyright infringement. They allege that the San Francisco company owes its success to a “brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously free-riding on the valuable content” produced by these two companies. Both companies reached out to Perplexity for a potential licensing deal for their content, but now both have filed a lawsuit after never receiving a response.
They allege that Perplexity has copied hundreds of thousands of their articles without permission for use in its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) database. They call this practice un-transformative and allege that it does not constitute fair use as the articles are preserved in their entirety for the Perplexity AI to recall at will when asked. Perplexity can recall detailed and quote-heavy summaries of paywall protected articles on both the Wall Street Journal and New York Post websites.