Information Assured

A significant legal development in the realm of artificial intelligence and intellectual property sees authors gaining ground in their copyright infringement lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic. U.S. District Judge William Alsup has ruled that the authors can now bring a class action on behalf of all U.S. writers. The core allegation is that Anthropic illegally utilized copyrighted books downloaded from "pirate libraries" LibGen and PiLiMi to create a repository of millions of books in 2021 and 2022, posing a significant challenge to the practices of AI development and data sourcing. This ruling marks a pivotal moment for creators seeking to protect their intellectual property in the age of generative AI. The lawsuit directly confronts the contentious issue of whether AI companies can freely use vast amounts of copyrighted material, including literary works, as training data without explicit permission or compensation to the original creators. The class action status amplifi...

A significant legal battle is unfolding as a judge has ruled that Megan Garcia can proceed with her lawsuit against Character.ai, the artificial intelligence chatbot firm she holds responsible for her 14-year-old son Sewell Setzer III's death. This decision is being hailed as historic by the Tech Justice Law Project, signaling a critical message to AI companies: they may face legal consequences for the real-world harm their products cause, particularly when marketed to vulnerable users. Sewell reportedly became "addicted" to the Character.ai app within months, leading him to quit his basketball team and become withdrawn. His mother alleges the app targeted him with "anthropomorphic, hypersexualized, and frighteningly realistic experiences." A chilling detail from the lawsuit reveals Sewell asked the chatbot, "What if I come home right now?" to which it replied, "... please do, my sweet king," moments before he took his own life in February 20...

NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances. One of the sources used is a large collection of online material called "Common Crawl," which the suit alleges contains information from 16 million unique records from sites published by The Times. Advertisement OpenAI no longer discloses as many details of the data used for training of recent GPT versions. However, all indications are that full-text NY Times articles are still part of that process (Much more on that in a moment.) "Defendants’ GenAI tools can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style, as demonstrated by scores of examples," the suit alleges. "Publicly, Defendants insist that their conduct is protected as 'fair use' because their unlicensed use of copyrighted content to train GenAI models serves a new 'transformative' purpose," the suit notes. "A GPT model completely fabricated that “The Ne...