Aug 2, 2023
Whether one loves or hates ChatGPT, this much is clear: it is by far the fastest, lowest-cost (non-advertising based) way to quicky obtain information and perhaps even some “knowledge” on a given topic. As much as it feels like someone is conveying more than just information to us, it is still software pulling text, numbers and other data from across the internet and presenting it in a user-friendly matter within seconds. Despite a major legal “hallucination snafu” we mentioned in last month’s podcast, large language model (LLM based) AI tools are still going to impact knowledge workers, but a ruling on intellectual property could change all that. Last week a new federal class action complaint was filed in the federal court in San Francisco claiming that OpenAI effectively plagiarized information from authors while ignoring all copyright rights. Will OpenAI eventually concede some responsibility for paying royalties or will this case eventually need Supreme Court review? Today host Jack Russo and the CLG Educational Team discuss if AI based scraping practices are copyright infringement or are the First Amendment and statutorily protected fair-use of the “ideas” and underlying data and not the “protected expression” of the copyrighted works (which the lawsuit limits to just the registered copyrights of record in the US Copyright Office).