Friday’s Endnotes – 03/28/25

The Global Creative Community Stands Unified Against Unchecked AI Use — “Artists, writers, musicians, designers, photographers, and other creative professionals are dealing with the impact of AI on their respective industries—with perspectives ranging from concern to outright opposition. The overarching issue is that AI companies are profiting from data that was never intended for their use without consent.”

Court Advances The New York Times Lawsuit Against OpenAI — “The Times filed the lawsuit in 2023 after an impasse in negotiations with OpenAI and Microsoft over a deal that’d resolve concerns around the use of its articles to train automated chatbots. The Times, after the highly publicized releases of ChatGPT and BingChat, notified the companies that their tech infringed on its articles. The terms of a resolution involved a licensing agreement and the institution of guardrails around generative artificial intelligence tools, though the talks reached no such truce.”

UK Publishers and Cambridge, Call out Meta and Piracy in Generative AI Training — “Today (March 25), the Publishers Association in the UK has pointed to Alex Reisner’s article at the Stateside Atlantic magazine, in which Reisner writes, ‘When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?’ And this, of course, dovetails perfectly with Pallante’s closing comments in the AAP response to the call for comment in the states, in which she wrote, ‘Among our priorities is stopping the proliferation of pirate sites that are a scourge on American IP investments and an illegal source of AI development.’ More than once, she lands clearly on the point of piracy being involved as a source of ‘training’ content in generative AI that’s copyrighted, and pirated, then hoovered up by large language models.”

Anthropic wins early round in music publishers’ AI copyright case — “U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee said that the publishers’ request was too broad and that they failed to show Anthropic’s conduct caused them ‘irreparable harm.’ The publishers said in a statement that they ‘remain very confident in our case against Anthropic more broadly.'”

Dua Lipa wins copyright case over Levitating — “On Thursday, US Judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled that the songs only had generic similarities, including non-copyrightable musical elements that had also previously been used by Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Bee Gees in their song Stayin’ Alive. It is the second time that Lipa has won a plagiarism case over Levitating, which was a global hit in 2020.”