The explosive development and spread of generative artificial intelligence (GAI), with its potential for embedding itself in every aspect of our lives, poses a dizzying plethora of issues: environmental, social, existential, even apocalyptic. In this post, I'm going to be focusing on an issue of primary concern to those of us in the creative industries: the struggle to apply the framework of copyright law to GAI companies' utilization of our work for training their systems.

Developing and training the networks and large language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT and image generation systems like Midjourney requires vast amounts of data scraped from the internet: text, images, music, and more, including material protected by copyright. As we've been discovering over the past couple of years, GAI developers haven't exactly been scrupulous about obtaining the permission of creators for the use of this material.

GAI companies argue that it's not possible to develop their products without using copyrighted materials, and in any case, that to do so is fair use.* Creators, on the other hand, want to be able to control access to their work, as guaranteed by copyright law--and, incidentally, get paid for the exploitation of it. There's enormous anger in creative communities not just over these issues, but over the ways in which GAI can potentially supplant human creators and destroy livelihoods--not to mention the degree to which it is enshittifying the creative sphere by flooding the zone with GAI slop.