In AI-copyright battle, an existential crisis emerges

WHEN our artificial intelligence (AI) overlords finally subjugate the human race and start generating self-aggrandising paeans to the robot regime, mankind might at least get some songwriting credit. Last week, a US congressman introduced a Bill that would make it mandatory to disclose the use of copyrighted works in the training of generative AI models.

Detractors of the Bill have been quick to object, pleading fair use. They reason that an AI model being trained is no different from a human being inspired by others’ work. And, if The Beatles had taken every single musician they had inspired to court, they would have become full-time litigants, not lyricists.

To the layman, this equivalence must be baffling. The “fair use” doctrine applies to the limited use of a copyrighted work for a transformative purpose. Given the sheer volume of content that AI models are ingesting, it beggars belief that the “limited” definition could possibly be met.