Shabbi Khan Comments on Copyright Infringement Suits Against Generative AI Companies
Foley & Lardner LLP partner Shabbi Khan is quoted in The Hill article, “New York Times-ChatGPT lawsuit poses new legal threats to artificial intelligence,” offering insight on litigation brought against major technology companies for training artificial intelligence platforms on copyrighted work without permission.
Khan said typically these AI models are transformative in nature. “If you asked it a general query…it doesn’t do a search and find the right passage and just reproduce the passage,” he explained. “It will try to probabilistically create its own version of what needs to be said based on a pattern that it picks up through parsing billions of words of content.”
“I think [The Times] did a good job relative to what maybe other complaints have been put out in the past,” Khan told The Hill. “They provided multiple examples of basically snippets and quite frankly more than snippets, passages of The New York Times as reproductions.”
Khan suggested the court could decide that particular use cases of generative AI are not transformative enough and require companies to limit certain prompts or outputs to prevent AI models from reproducing copyrighted content.
Eventually, Khan said he thinks there will be a mechanism in place through which tech companies can obtain licenses to content, such as articles from The Times, for training their AI models.
“I think most publishers will adopt that model because it provides for additional revenue to the company,” Khan added. “And we can see that because The New York Times tried to enter into [an agreement]. So, there is a price that they’re willing to accept.”
