Writers, bloggers, YouTube vloggers, musicians, and journalists have all helped feed the LLMs that are now threatening to destroy—or at least fundamentally change—their livelihoods. It seems obvious that creating synthetic AI music and other content without paying for the training data isn’t fair to the original creators. But is it legal? We’ll soon see.
The developers of LLMs claim that scraping and training on the internet’s treasures without permission is “fair use.” Creators don’t agree, prompting federal lawsuits. In the Southern District of New York, the New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement. In the Massachusetts District, seven major record labels are suing the company behind Suno AI, a generative AI service that “creates digital music files within seconds of receiving a user’s prompts.”
