AI-Jungle Guide #2: Copyright Battles

US Record Labels Sue AI Music Generators / Figma AI: There and Back Again / OpenAI and Time: An Unexpected Alliance

Author

Stefan Grothkopp
July 03, 2024

Hello and welcome back to the AI-Jungle Guide!

This week's news turned out to be mostly about copyright, intellectual property, and lawsuits. While that might not be the most exciting topic, it’s a very important one for AI and generative AI in particular.

So, let’s enter the copyright jungle….

Some music exec’s beating up a poor music-generating AI. leonardo.ai

News:

  1. Mordor US Record Labels Sue AI Music Generators Suno and Udio.
    Last week, Warner, Universal, and Sony all sued AI music generators for copyright infringement [1]. They found that these generators could create songs that “bear a striking resemblance to copyrighted songs.” Bold claim from an industry that has used the same four chords for every song in the last 40 years [2].

    On the other hand, that probably means that those music generators are finally good enough to make the music industry feel threatened (try them yourself and find out!).

  2. Figma AI: There and Back Again.
    Last week, the UI/UX design tool Figma released built-in AI functionality [3]. It was pretty well received until it was pulled back yesterday because someone managed to use it to recreate the exact UI of the Apple Weather App [4][5].

  3. OpenAI and Time: An Unexpected Alliance.
    OpenAI struck a deal with Time (the magazine) [6]. They can use Time’s archives and current issues for training, and in return, they will reference that content and send some visitors to Time’s web content.
    In the past, OpenAI already partnered with Stack Overflow to include programming data and source code in their training [7].
    At first, that sounds like a great first step in the right direction, but it could also be used as an excuse to use other content for free.

How Figma’s AI and CEO probably looked while building that weather app.

Background:

  1. How does Copyright affect AI?
    Copyright comes into play at two stages regarding AI:

    The first is training data. Udio and Suno were most likely trained on millions of copyrighted songs (you could say the model listened to Spotify for a few millennia). It is hard to prove that it was trained on a particular song, though. So, the record labels, which are suing about training data in the first place, might not have an easy case here.

    The second part is the output of generative AI: If you use an image generator to create a picture of Mickey Mouse or Super Mario, you will still be infringing Disney's or Nintendo's copyright. For that reason, most image generators will already filter and block names of trademarks or celebrities.

  1. How does Copyright affect the Figma AI?
    The same way images or songs are protected by copyright, user interfaces and designs can be too. While most websites and apps tend to be a bit generic these days, some apps and interfaces stand out and are easily recognizable.

    Nobody can say if Apple would really sue over the design of their weather app or if they would have a chance to win that case, but Figma isn’t eager to find out. Imagine facing the world’s second most valuable company (Side note: places 1-5, 7, and 8 are in some way related to AI at the moment!).

  2. Copyright Deals, why and who does benefit?
    OpenAI is tackling the problem of copyright related to training data by making deals with big content creators like Time and Stack Overflow. They can officially use this data for training, and they also benefit from the fact that you can never tell which part of the training data was used in a particular answer by the final model.

    So, if ChatGPT answers some code-related questions, they can easily say that the “source” was Stack Overflow. If the answer was actually crawled from your personal blog, you would have a really hard time proving that. One downside is that currently only the big players are benefiting from these deals. Time magazine will get some money (or at least exposure); your blog will not. Let’s hope that will change in the future.

Weather App build with claude.ai. Not bad and little risk to be sued by apple!

Try it yourself:

  1. Make a song about Copyright!
    You can try suno, udio and boomy to make a song (while you still can!). If you can’t think of lyrics, generate them with ChatGPT or Claude first (Prompt: “Write a funny song about copyright with 3 verses and a chorus!”).
    Udio has a generous free tier that lets you make and extend 30-second clips (try one verse and the chorus at a time).

  2. Make a design in Figma or Claude!
    You can try Figma’s AI when it comes back, or you can try generating a design in Claude with the artifacts feature! (Prompt: “Design a modern mobile weather app. Use the artifacts feature.”)

  3. Strike a copyright deal with OpenAI!
    Okay, not very actionable for most of us. In this regard, we can only wait until small creators somehow benefit from the fact that their creations are also used as training data for the big AI models.

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