Humanity’s groundbreaking copyright control is a victory for the AI industry, but the company is still on the hook for claims of copyright infringement
In a test case for the artificial intelligence industry, a federal judge ruled that humanity, an AI company, did not break the law by training chatbot clauds on millions of copyrighted books.
However, the company is still on the hook and must go to court for how it obtained these books by downloading them from the online “Shadow Library” of pirated copies.
San Francisco US District Judge William Alsup said in a ruling filed late Monday that it is a “typical transformation” as AI systems distill from thousands of written works, allowing them to create their own texts that have been certified as “fair use” under US copyright law.
“Like readers who are aiming to become writers, humanity (the AI-based language model) trained their works to not race, recreate, or replace them first.
However, dismissing important claims by a group of authors who sued the company for copyright infringement last year, Allsup said that humanity still has to go to trial in December for alleged theft of their works.
“Humanity had no right to use pirated copies in the Central Library,” writes Alsup.
The trio of Andrea Burtz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson argued last summer that human practice amounted to “a massive theft” and that the company “sought to benefit from stripping the human representation and originality behind each of those works.”
As lawsuits have progressed in federal courts in San Francisco over the past year, documents disclosed in courts illustrate internal human concerns regarding the legality of the use of online repository of pirated works. So the company later shifted its approach and tried to buy a copy of the digitized book.
“The fact that humanity later purchased a copy of a book that he had stolen from the Internet will not be liable for theft, but it could affect the extent of statutory damage,” writes Alsup.
Judgment may set precedent Similar lawsuits Anthropic Comperitor Openai, the maker of ChatGpt, and the Meta platform, the parent company of Facebook, and Instagram.
Humanity – Founded in 2021 by a former Openi leader – is sold as a developer of a more responsible and secure AI model of the generation AI model that allows you to create emails, summarise documents, and interact with people in a natural way.
However, a lawsuit filed last year claimed that humanity’s actions “had a laugh at its lofty goals” by leveraging a repository of pirated books to build AI products.
Humanity said Tuesday that the judge was pleased to recognize that AI training is consistent with the “copyright purpose that enables creativity and promotes scientific advancement.” The statement did not address any claims of copyright infringement.
The author’s lawyer declined to comment.