The legal fight for the future of artificial intelligence

The New York Times is suing the creator of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence bot the Times alleges was trained on millions of its copyrighted articles. It’s not the only such lawsuit, but it is the biggest. What this all boils down to are questions that will determine the future of a technology that has the potential to change the world — for good or ill.

“The New York Times says you’re not just learning about American history from reading Times’ articles. You are using this to potentially produce articles that compete with the New York Times for journalism. You are free riding off of our work in a way that undermines the market for it,” said James Grimmelmann, Tessler Family Professor of Digital and Information Law, Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School.

How different are a human and a computer when each is learning from example? As machines become able to mimic the creative endeavours humans have mastered, what compensation is owed to the creators they learned from? And can bots like ChatGPT even survive without free access to a world of copyrighted material?

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