Adam Schiff AI copyright bill
April 10, 2024
Adam Schiff, Democratic representative for California’s 30th district, has introduced legislation which would require companies to disclose their use of copyrighted work for training generative AI models. Under his proposal, companies would have 30 days to submit this disclosure as a notice to the Register of Copyrights from the date that AI systems are publicly released, or — if the AI systems have already been released — 30 days to submit the notice once the bill goes into effect.
While I am not opposed to regulation, it's not at all clear that a simple disclosure is going to be meaningful here. The problem with building systems based on copywritten materials is less about what material is used and more about how it is used. If it is used to help a system be more fluent, then there seems to be no harm. If it is used to create new content that competes with the content creators themselves, threatening their livelihood, that is a different issue.
This is more of an issue of business than technology. While we need to make sure that content creators are treated fairly, it is not clear that this bill will help at all.
Disclosure is a tiny piece of the problem. We still need to figure out what companies are allowed to do with the models they build and who they need to compensate. The use of the materials is less important than what they are used for.
If the use results in threatening the financial future of the content creators, we have to determine if that is allowed and how they should be compensated. If it provides value to the companies that could not be achieved without the content used in training, we also need to establish how the creators should be compensated.
But these are business issues, not technology issues.
Kristian Hammond
Bill and Cathy Osborn Professor of Computer Science
Director of the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI)
Director of the Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) Program
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