Lawyer Leads Wave of Lawsuits Against AI Giants' Use of Copyrighted Material
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Matthew Butterick is a lawyer spearheading legal battles against AI giants like Microsoft and Meta for training algorithms with copyrighted material without consent.
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He filed the first ever lawsuit against an AI company (Microsoft) in 2022. He now coordinates 4 class action lawsuits on behalf of programmers, artists, and writers.
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Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney are trained on huge databases of copyrighted texts, images, music. Creators aren't compensated and may lose jobs.
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Butterick teamed up with lawyers to sue Microsoft's GitHub Copilot in 2022 for violating open source licenses. Then visual artists and authors approached them to file more lawsuits.
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The wave of lawsuits argues generative AI training is illegal. If successful, companies may have to delete databases and retrain algorithms, paying creators, which would be a massive blow.