The new bill is the latest in a wave of AI-related legislation.
A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill to make it easier to authenticate and detect artificial intelligence-generated content and protect journalists and artists from having their work gobbled up by AI models without their permission.
The Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act) would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create standards and guidelines that help prove the origin of content and detect synthetic content, like through watermarking. It also directs the agency to create security measures to prevent tampering and requires AI tools for creative or journalistic content to let users attach information about their origin and prohibit that information from being removed. Under the bill, such content also could not be used to train AI models.
Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers. State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission could also enforce the bill, which its backers say prohibits anyone from “removing, disabling, or tampering with content provenance information” outside of an exception for some security research purposes.
(A copy of the bill is in he article, here is the important part imo:
Prohibits the use of “covered content” (digital representations of copyrighted works) with content provenance to either train an AI- /algorithm-based system or create synthetic content without the express, informed consent and adherence to the terms of use of such content, including compensation)
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, before you stands 8-year-old Billy Smith. He stands accused of training on copyrighted material. We actually have live video of him looking and reading books from the library. He he trained on the contents of over 100 books this year.
We ask you to enforce the maximum penalty and send his parents to prison.
Your machine learning algorithms are not people. No amount of calling it Alex or giving it a voice stolen from a well-known actress will change that fact.
If I traced an artwork or copied GPL licensed code into an non-GPL one, my ass would be beaten by others on the internet.
So far, the main usecase of this generative technology is scamming, intentionally creating distrust in the artist community, and an even worse and scummier form of plagiarism, but it doesn't matter because some shitpost that goes hard, "what if a content creator needs a stock photo?", and "what if it could be used to resurrect your favorite artist?".
Power imbalance. There's a difference a young creator not having money to buy a training material and a big corporation wanting to destroy their profession.
If I traced an artwork or copied GPL licensed code into an non-GPL one, my ass would be beaten by others on the internet.
If I gave you an arbitrary image from Midjourney and all of the training data from it, I doubt you could match it to the "source art." AI images are usually transformative.
This, exactly. AI is generating new images. Oh whoop de do, they did it by mixing a bunch of pixels. As though making an image out of tiny photos isnt literally the same thing and considered transformative. People just have a double standard about a program instead of a person doing it. (Except for that subset kd online artists, they're just bezerk about copyright and credit in general)
Different scale, but just go on and defend your billion dollar industry, because "what if it was open source" despite the open source community would never have the ability and the resources to train these models.
I honestly could not give less of a shit who's training the models. I'm not gonna boycott C# because it was developed by Microsoft. There are open source implementations of generative AI that make use of freely-available models.