Two stories on AI and copyright

A bit on copyright. There have been two different stories in the news relating to copyright and AI this week.

The first, about a petition now signed by over 20,000 musicians and writers that argues:

“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.”

I happy to say I’ve signed this in a personal/musician capacity in solidarity with the other (far more successful!) musicians and writers who have signed. I’m sure we all wear many different hats at different times. The key for me is ‘unlicensed’. Clearly I’ve no problem with AI models being trained, but the creators of the training material should be paid if it was copyrighted, and paid appropriately, including for models that have already been trained.

The other story is titled “Microsoft boss urges rethink of copyright laws for AI”. It’s in The Times, behind a paywall, so I won’t link. I agree with the core of the argument that we need copyright laws to updated to keep up with technology, but I can’t be the only one that thinks these statements is are absurd:

“Speaking after Microsoft’s launch of virtual employees at an event in London, he compared the situation to that of using information from textbooks to formulate new ideas. “If I read a set of textbooks and I create new knowledge, is that fair use?” he said.”

“What’s copyright?” Nadella asked. “If everything is just copyright then I shouldn’t be reading textbooks and learning because that would be copyright infringement.”

I think he’s trying to create a link in people’s minds between humans reading and AI models being trained, claiming they are both ‘just’ learning. Something that I think only works because we ended up with the word ‘learning’ being used in AI (as in Machine Learning) for a process where a model is iteratively optimised to predict an outcome.

Maybe The Times has taken this out of context. I’d be interested if anyone knows any more on this. But honestly, if the article is correct, this really, really isn’t helping with the debate.