Generative AI and the Challenge of Compensating Creators: A Recap of This Week in AI

In a groundbreaking move this week, eight prominent U.S. newspapers owned by investment giant Alden Global Capital, including the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, and Orlando Sentinel, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement related to the companies’ use of generative AI technology. The newspapers accused OpenAI and Microsoft of scraping their intellectual property without permission or compensation to develop and commercialize generative models like GPT-4.

Frank Pine, the executive editor overseeing Alden’s newspapers, stated, “We’ve spent billions of dollars gathering information and reporting news at our publications, and we can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the big tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense.”

While a settlement and licensing deal are expected, OpenAI is already exploring ways to compensate content creators for their contributions to AI-generated content. A research paper co-authored by Boaz Barak from OpenAI’s Superalignment team proposes a framework based on cooperative game theory to determine fair compensation for copyright owners based on their influence on AI-generated content.

The framework evaluates the impact of content in a training dataset on the output of AI models and calculates the rightful share of compensation for content owners. Although the framework is computationally expensive, it offers a potential solution to the ongoing issue of fair compensation for content creators in the AI industry.

In addition to this groundbreaking development, other notable AI stories from the past few days include Microsoft reaffirming its ban on facial recognition for police departments, AI-native startups facing unique challenges, and advancements in AI applications in various industries such as fish harvesting and energy infrastructure. Stay tuned for more updates on the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence.