AI: Legal challenges that pose a risk to AI in 2024
Tech stocks surged in 2023 around AI excitement, but copyright lawsuits could pose a risk as the New York Times (NYT) sues Microsoft (MSFT) and OpenAI over infringement related to using its news articles to train their large language models.
Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Daniel Howley reports on the changing landscape for AI development, particularly in response to or in preparation for future legal challenges.
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Video Transcript
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- 2023 will always be known as the year of the great AI boom. Investment and excitement around AI pushing tech stocks higher to end the year. And companies like NVIDIA saw extraordinary gains. But now investors are turning attention to the risks that AI may pose. And last week we saw a big one, with the New York Times suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement. Several other groups also sued AI companies in 2023. So the question now is, is copyright law the biggest risk to generative AI in the new year? For more on this, we turn to Yahoo Finance's own Dan Howley. Hey, Dan.
DANIEL HOWLEY: That's right. We're looking at the ongoing changing landscape when it comes to generative AI. And as you said, Rachelle, part of this now has to come down to copyright. Basically, just as a general background, these AI systems are trained on millions and millions of data points. Those can include news articles, or different posts online, and it's just generally the internet that these are usually trained on, especially the public ones.
And so what you end up with is questions of, are copyrighted articles, books, things along those lines, being used to train these systems? And so far we've seen several lawsuits come out, as you noted the most recent being the New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft. The question is whether or not those copyright materials were used on the training. And so we've seen some pushback on these kinds of questions.
There's been some cases where people who are filing suits have been told by the court you have to be more specific about whether there are actually your products in these platforms. That has to do on the side of things with art itself. Whether you're a painter, or artist, things along those lines. If those visual generative AI platforms have used your art on the written side of things, there's questions as to whether or not the material continues to exist, or if it's any different than, say, a search engine bringing up information about your own article and then showing it there.
So there's a lot of questions here that still need to be sussed out. And so it isn't likely that we'll see these kinds of platforms evaporate because of this. This isn't necessarily an existential threat to them. But it is something that companies are going to have to be careful about going forward. That there's a lot to do with copyright in the internet, obviously as I said, when it comes to even search engines, social media.
These questions have already been answered in the past, so now we're going to have to see if they can apply to these kinds of generative AI systems. And so as we see more companies not only develop them, but their clients start to use them, that's going to be a question that needs to be answered going forward.
- Indeed, that legal minefield. We saw it starting with creatives and musicians, but now really expanding beyond authors and writers as well. We'll continue to track that. Appreciate you as always. Yahoo Finance reporter, Dan Howley.
