News Media Alliance Says AI Chatbots Are Illegally Using Copyrighted News

News Media Alliance (NMA) is a nonprofit trade association representing around 2,000 print and digital news and magazine media companies in the U.S. and Canada. Companies such as CBS and Vicacom, owned by Paramount Global PARAPARAA; Comcast Corporation CMCSA; News Corp NWSA; AT&T Inc. T and Walt Disney Co. DIS control around 90% of media in the U.S.

A white paper by NMA addressed the aggressive copying of its members’ expressive works used to train generative artificial intelligence systems. 

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What Happened: NMA in its white paper and accompanying submission to the U.S. Copyright Office stated the data sets that trained AI models significantly used a bigger chunk of news publisher content compared to other sources.

This leads to AI generations copying and using publisher content in their outputs, infringing on their copyright. It puts the news outlets in competition with AI models.

To combat the issues, the NMA recommended the Copyright Office declare that using a publication’s content to monetize AI systems harmed publishers.

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“Many generative AI developers have chosen to scrape publisher content without permission and use it for model training and in real-time to create competing products,” NMA said.

The group argued that while news publishers make investments and take on risks, the AI developer was the one who was rewarded for users, data, brand creation and advertising dollars. The publishers also faced setbacks such as reduced revenues, employment opportunities and adversely affected relationships with their viewers.

What Does the NMA Recommend: NMA recommended the Copyright Office should declare using a publication’s content to monetize AI systems harms publishers, according to Cointelegraph. It also called for various licensing models and transparency measures to limit the intake of copyrighted materials. The Copyright Office should also adopt measures to scrap protected content from third-party websites.

The NMA did suggest using generative AI for proofreading, idea generation and search engine optimization only.

In the past year, the usage of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Anthropic’s Claude increased significantly. All have been criticized and faced copyright infringement claims in court.

In September 2023 it came to light that the New York Times Co NYT was considering legal action against OpenAI over ChatGPT data scrapping. Earlier in the year, Sarah Silverman and other authors sued the open-source AI platform and Meta Platforms Inc. META over claims of copyright infringement. Alphabet Inc. GOOGGOOGL-owned Google also faced a class-action lawsuit over the alleged secret theft of personal and creative data for AI training.

Read Next: Universal Music Sues AI Startup Anthropic Over Copyright Infringement

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