New artificial intelligence: Will Silicon Valley ride again to riches on other people’s products?
Summary
Chatbots and other forms of generative artificial intelligence that burst onto the technology scene in recent months are fed vast amounts of material scraped from the internet — books, screenplays, research papers, news stories, photos, art, music, code and more — to produce answers, imagery or sound in response to user prompts. Stability AI, in an April court filing, argued that its software “enables users to create entirely new and unique images” and that its technology does not produce material with “substantial similarity” to artists’ copyrighted work. “It could decimate our industry.” The new technology, as happened with other Silicon Valley innovations, including internet-search, social media and food delivery, is catching on among consumers and businesses so quickly that it may become entrenched — and beloved by users — long before regulators and lawmakers gather the knowledge and political will to impose restraints and mitigate harms. It’s all part of an evolution of our society’s storehouse of knowledge.” Technological advances, however, have a history of skirting legal protections for content producers, noted renowned wildlife photographer Frans Lanting of Santa Cruz. “We also don’t want to put America in second or third place.” Sunnyvale software engineer Johannes Ernst, CEO of Dazzle Labs, a startup building a platform for control of personal data, said content producers could annotate their work with conditions for use that would have to be followed by companies crawling the web for AI fodder.