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Sinan Aral Says Copyright Laws Haven’t Considered Gen-AI

January 09, 2024

IDE Director, Sinan Aral, weighed in on the news that The New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly using millions of articles without permission to train its AI chatbots.

Speaking with Yahoo! Finance December 27, Aral noted that while the challenge was expected, it breaks new ground in the area of ‘fair use’ of content and what AI can and can’t use.

“Training very large language models on millions, as the lawsuit indicates, of pieces of content by The New York Times is a new use,” he said. “In other words, [AI-generated content] hasn’t been considered a traditional use of copyrighted material. And therefore, we have not decided as a society whether this is fair use or not,” according to Aral.

“And that’s why this case is so important because it will decide either through case law or through settlement how much we believe content producers deserve in terms of use of this type ofcontent, and that’s what’s new about this case.”

Watch the segment here.