Anthropic wins key US ruling on AI training in authors' copyright lawsuit; Reuters, June 24, 2025

 Blake Brittain, Reuters; Anthropic wins key US ruling on AI training in authors' copyright lawsuit

 "A federal judge in San Francisco ruled late on Monday that Anthropic's use of books without permission to train its artificial intelligence system was legal under U.S. copyright law.

Siding with tech companies on a pivotal question for the AI industry, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said Anthropic made "fair use" of books by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson to train its Claude large language model.

Alsup also said, however, that Anthropic's copying and storage of more than 7 million pirated books in a "central library" infringed the authors' copyrights and was not fair use. The judge has ordered a trial in December to determine how much Anthropic owes for the infringement."

Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book; Ars Technica, June 20, 2025

 TIMOTHY B. LEE  , Ars Techcnica; Study: Meta AI model can reproduce almost half of Harry Potter book

"In recent years, numerous plaintiffs—including publishers of books, newspapers, computer code, and photographs—have sued AI companies for training models using copyrighted material. A key question in all of these lawsuits has been how easily AI models produce verbatim excerpts from the plaintiffs’ copyrighted content.

For example, in its December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI, The New York Times Company produced dozens of examples where GPT-4 exactly reproduced significant passages from Times stories. In its response, OpenAI described this as a “fringe behavior” and a “problem that researchers at OpenAI and elsewhere work hard to address.”

But is it actually a fringe behavior? And have leading AI companies addressed it? New research—focusing on books rather than newspaper articles and on different companies—provides surprising insights into this question. Some of the findings should bolster plaintiffs’ arguments, while others may be more helpful to defendants.

The paper was published last month by a team of computer scientists and legal scholars from Stanford, Cornell, and West Virginia University. They studied whether five popular open-weight models—three from Meta and one each from Microsoft and EleutherAI—were able to reproduce text from Books3, a collection of books that is widely used to train LLMs. Many of the books are still under copyright."

A.I.-Generated Reading List in Chicago Sun-Times Recommends Nonexistent Books; The New York Times, May 21, 2025

 Talya Minsberg , The New York Times; A.I.-Generated Reading List in Chicago Sun-Times Recommends Nonexistent Books

"The summer reading list tucked into a special section of The Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer seemed innocuous enough.

There were books by beloved authors such as Isabel Allende and Min Jin Lee; novels by best sellers including Delia Owens, Taylor Jenkins Reid and Brit Bennett; and a novel by Percival Everett, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner.

There was just one issue: None of the book titles attributed to the above authors were real. They had been created by generative artificial intelligence.

It’s the latest case of bad A.I. making its way into the news. While generative A.I. has improved, there is still no way to ensure the systems produce accurate information. A.I. chatbots cannot distinguish between what is true and what is false, and they often make things up. The chatbots can spit out information and expert names with an air of authority."

Most AI chatbots easily tricked into giving dangerous responses, study finds; The Guardian, May 21, 2025

Ian Sample  , The Guardian; Most AI chatbots easily tricked into giving dangerous responses, study finds

"Hacked AI-powered chatbots threaten to make dangerous knowledge readily available by churning out illicit information the programs absorb during training, researchers say.

The warning comes amid a disturbing trend for chatbots that have been “jailbroken” to circumvent their built-in safety controls. The restrictions are supposed to prevent the programs from providing harmful, biased or inappropriate responses to users’ questions.

The engines that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude – large language models (LLMs) – are fed vast amounts of material from the internet.

Despite efforts to strip harmful text from the training data, LLMs can still absorb information about illegal activities such as hacking, money laundering, insider trading and bomb-making. The security controls are designed to stop them using that information in their responses.

In a report on the threat, the researchers conclude that it is easy to trick most AI-driven chatbots into generating harmful and illegal information, showing that the risk is “immediate, tangible and deeply concerning”...

The research, led by Prof Lior Rokach and Dr Michael Fire at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, identified a growing threat from “dark LLMs”, AI models that are either deliberately designed without safety controls or modified through jailbreaks. Some are openly advertised online as having “no ethical guardrails” and being willing to assist with illegal activities such as cybercrime and fraud."

This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value”; Vanity Fair, April 15, 2025

 

KEZIAH WEIR, Vanity Fair; This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value”

"Last month, I prompted Meta AI with a question: “Is it okay to use pirated books to train AI?” The machine’s response was unequivocal. “Using pirated books to train AI is not okay,” it admonished. “In fact, it’s a serious violation of copyright laws and can have significant consequences for authors and publishers. Recently, it’s been reported that Meta used millions of pirated books to develop its AI programs, which has sparked widespread outrage and condemnation from the writing community.”"

The philosopher’s machine: my conversation with Peter Singer’s AI chatbot; The Guardian, April 17, 2025

Stephanie Convery , The Guardian; The philosopher’s machine: my conversation with Peter Singer’s AI chatbot

"Singer has had a long and high-profile career in philosophy. He has only recently retired from Princeton University, where he was professor of bioethics. His CV is extensive (it runs to a full 102 pages). He has a Substack, a podcast, a Bluesky account, a journal he co-edits, and a polished online presence. As I’m scrolling through the storied septuagenarian philosopher’s blog, the chatbot pops up in the corner of the page. I can’t help but feeling like I am being sold something.

In launching his chatbot, Singer described the tool as “employing the Socratic method” – that is, dialogue – to “[guide] users through a process of critical thinking and self-examination”. But I have questions about that.

Me: Do you think it is philosophically justifiable to outsource the discussion of ethics to a chatbot?

Peter Singer AI: Outsourcing ethical discussions to a chatbot can be philosophically justifiable if viewed as a tool to enhance and facilitate ethical reflection. Chatbots can provide insights, pose questions, and offer perspectives that might help individuals think more deeply about ethical issues.

However, it’s crucial to remember that chatbots lack human experience, empathy, and the ability to understand context fully. They should be used as a complement to human judgment and conversation, not a replacement.

Engaging with a chatbot can stimulate thinking and provide a starting point for deeper exploration, but ultimately, ethical decision-making involves personal reflection and discussion with others...

My most memorable and exciting philosophy lessons were the ones in which, as a class, we hotly debated ideas in which we were all materially and emotionally invested. The AI floats loftily above the emotional fray, coolly dispensing pre-programmed wisdom from the cloud, while we grapple with the contradictions and complications of actually living. Between the chatbot and me, there is only one of us for whom the dialogue elicits an emotional response, because for only one of us does the conversation actually matter."

Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward; NPR, March 27, 2025

 Bobby Allyn, NPR ; Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward

"A federal judge on Wednesday rejected OpenAI's request to toss out a copyright lawsuit from The New York Times that alleges that the tech company exploited the newspaper's content without permission or payment.

In an order allowing the lawsuit to go forward, Judge Sidney Stein, of the Southern District of New York, narrowed the scope of the lawsuit but allowed the case's main copyright infringement claims to go forward.

Stein did not immediately release an opinion but promised one would come "expeditiously."

The decision is a victory for the newspaper, which has joined forces with other publishers, including The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, to challenge the way that OpenAI collected vast amounts of data from the web to train its popular artificial intelligence service, ChatGPT."

Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case; Reuters, March 26, 2025

 Blake Brittain , Reuters; Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case

"Artificial intelligence company Anthropic convinced a California federal judge on Tuesday to reject a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by Universal Music Group and other music publishers to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee said that the publishers' request was too broad and that they failed to show Anthropic's conduct caused them "irreparable harm."

Character.AI Confirms Mass Deletion of Fandom Characters, Says They're Not Coming Back; Futurism, November 27, 2024

MAGGIE HARRISON DUPRÉ , Futurism; Character.AI Confirms Mass Deletion of Fandom Characters, Says They're Not Coming Back

"The embattled AI companion company Character.AI confirmed to Futurism that it removed a large number of characters from its platform, citing its adherence to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) and copyright law, but failing to say whether the deletions were proactive or in response to requests from the holders of the characters' intellectual property rights...

That's not surprising: Character.AI is currently facing a lawsuit brought by the family of a 14-year-old teenager in Florida who died by suicide after forming an intense relationship with a Daenerys Targaryen chatbot on its platform...

It's been a bad few months for Character.AI. In October, shortly before the recent lawsuit was filed, it was revealed that someone had created a chatbot based on a murdered teenager without consent from the slain teen's family. (The character was removed and Character.AI apologized, as AdWeek first reported.) And in recent weeks, we've reported on disturbing hordes of suicide, pedophilia, and eating disorder-themed chatbots hosted by the platform, all of which were freely accessible to Character.AI users of all ages."

Should you trust an AI-assisted doctor? I visited one to see.; The Washington Post, December 25, 2024

Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Washington Post; Should you trust an AI-assisted doctor? I visited one to see.

"The harm of generative AI — notorious for “hallucinations” — producing bad information is often difficult to see, but in medicine the danger is stark. One study found that out of 382 test medical questions, ChatGPT gave an “inappropriate” answer on 20 percent. A doctor using the AI to draft communications could inadvertently pass along bad advice.

Another study found that chatbots can echo doctors’ own biases, such as the racist assumption that Black people can tolerate more pain than White people. Transcription software, too, has been shown to invent things that no one ever said."

To Whom Does the World Belong? The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT.; Boston Review, December 10, 2024

 Alexander Hartley, Boston Review; To Whom Does the World Belong? The battle over copyright in the age of ChatGPT

"Who, if anyone, owns the copyright to a paragraph produced by a chatbot? As I write, nobody knows."

Google CEO: AI development is finally slowing down—‘the low-hanging fruit is gone’; CNBC, December 8, 2024

 Megan Sauer , CNBC; Google CEO: AI development is finally slowing down—‘the low-hanging fruit is gone’;

"Now, with the industry’s competitive landscape somewhat established — multiple big tech companies, including Google, have competing models — it’ll take time for another technological breakthrough to shock the AI industry into hyper-speed development again, Pichai said at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit last week.

“I think the progress is going to get harder. When I look at [2025], the low-hanging fruit is gone,” said Pichai, adding: “The hill is steeper ... You’re definitely going to need deeper breakthroughs as we get to the next stage.”...

Some tech CEOs, like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, agree with Pichai. “Seventy years of the Industrial Revolution, there wasn’t much industry growth, and then it took off ... it’s never going to be linear,” Nadella saidat the Fast Company Innovation Festival 2024 in October.

Others disagree, at least publicly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example, posted “there is no wall” on social media platform X in November — a response to reports that the recently released ChatGPT-4 was only moderately better than previous models."

In Wisconsin, Professors Worry AI Could Replace Them; Inside Higher Ed, December 6, 2024

Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed; In Wisconsin, Professors Worry AI Could Replace Them

"Faculty at the cash-strapped Universities of Wisconsin System are pushing back against a proposed copyright policy they believe would cheapen the relationship between students and their professors and potentially allow artificial intelligence bots to replace faculty members...

The policy proposal is not yet final and is open for public comment through Dec. 13. ..

Natalia Taft, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside who signed the open letter, told Inside Higher Ed that she believes the policy proposal “is part of the trend of the corporatization of academia.”...

Jane Ginsburg, a professor of literary and artistic property law at Columbia University School of Law, said the university has the law on its side. 

Under the 1976 Copyright Act, “course material prepared by employees, including professors, as part of their jobs comes within the definition of a ‘work made for hire,’ whose copyright vests initially in the employer (the University), not the employee (the professor).”"

The Copyrighted Material Being Used to Train AI; The Bulwark, December 7, 2024

SONNY BUNCH, The Bulwark; The Copyrighted Material Being Used to Train AI

"On this week’s episode, I talked to Alex Reisner about his pieces in the Atlantic highlighting the copyrighted material being hoovered into large language models to help AI chatbots simulate human speech. If you’re a screenwriter and would like to see which of your work has been appropriated to aid in the effort, click here; he has assembled a searchable database of nearly 140,000 movie and TV scripts that have been used without permission. (And you should read his other stories about copyright law reaching its breaking point and “the memorization problem.”) In this episode, we also got into the metaphysics of art and asked what sort of questions need to be asked as we hurtle toward the future. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend!"

A.I. Chatbots Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness; The New York Times, November 17, 2024

Gina Kolata , The New York Times; A.I. Chatbots Defeated Doctors at Diagnosing Illness

"Instead, in a study Dr. Rodman helped design, doctors who were given ChatGPT-4 along with conventional resources did only slightly better than doctors who did not have access to the bot. And, to the researchers’ surprise, ChatGPT alone outperformed the doctors.

“I was shocked,” Dr. Rodman said.

The chatbot, from the company OpenAI, scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent.

The study showed more than just the chatbot’s superior performance.

It unveiled doctors’ sometimes unwavering belief in a diagnosis they made, even when a chatbot potentially suggests a better one."

What AI knows about you; Axios, November 4, 2024

Ina Friend, Axios; What AI knows about you

"Most AI builders don't say where they are getting the data they use to train their bots and models — but legally they're required to say what they are doing with their customers' data.

The big picture: These data-use disclosures open a window onto the otherwise opaque world of Big Tech's AI brain-food fight.

• In this new Axios series, we'll tell you, company by company, what all the key players are saying and doing with your personal information and content.

Why it matters: You might be just fine knowing that picture you just posted on Instagram is helping train the next generative AI art engine. But you might not — or you might just want to be choosier about what you share.

Zoom out: AI makers need an incomprehensibly gigantic amount of raw data to train their large language and image models. 

• The industry's hunger has led to a data land grab: Companies are vying to teach their baby AIs using information sucked in from many different sources — sometimes with the owner's permission, often without it — before new laws and court rulings make that harder. 

Zoom in: Each Big Tech giant is building generative AI models, and many of them are using their customer data, in part, to train them.

• In some cases it's opt-in, meaning your data won't be used unless you agree to it. In other cases it is opt-out, meaning your information will automatically get used unless you explicitly say no. 
• These rules can vary by region, thanks to legal differences. For instance, Meta's Facebook and Instagram are "opt-out" — but you can only opt out if you live in Europe or Brazil.
• In the U.S., California's data privacy law is among the laws responsible for requiring firms to say what they do with user data. In the EU, it's the GDPR."

Mother says AI chatbot led her son to kill himself in lawsuit against its maker; The Guardian, October 23, 2024

Blake Montgomery , The Guardian; Mother says AI chatbot led her son to kill himself in lawsuit against its maker

"The mother of a teenager who killed himself after becoming obsessed with an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot now accuses its maker of complicity in his death.

Megan Garcia filed a civil suit against Character.ai, which makes a customizable chatbot for role-playing, in Florida federal court on Wednesday, alleging negligence, wrongful death and deceptive trade practices. Her son Sewell Setzer III, 14, died in Orlando, Florida, in February. In the months leading up to his death, Setzer used the chatbot day and night, according to Garcia."

Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff; The Bookseller, October 18, 2024

  MATILDA BATTERSBY, The Bookseller; Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff

"The world’s biggest trade publisher has changed the wording on its copyright pages to help protect authors’ intellectual property from being used to train large language models (LLMs) and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools, The Bookseller can exclusively reveal.

Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear “in imprint pages across our markets”. The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.

The statement also “expressly reserves [the titles] from the text and data mining exception”, in accordance with a European Parliament directive.

The move specifically to ban the use of its titles by AI firms for the development of chatbots and other digital tools comes amid a slew of copyright infringement cases in the US and reports that large tranches of pirated books have already been used by tech companies to train AI tools. In 2024, several academic publishers including Taylor & Francis, Wiley and Sage have announced partnerships to license content to AI firms.

PRH is believed to be the first of the Big Five anglophone trade publishers to amend its copyright information to reflect the acceleration of AI systems and the alleged reliance by tech companies on using published work to train language models."

Millions of people are creating nude images of pretty much anyone in minutes using AI bots in a ‘nightmarish scenario’; New York Post, October 15, 2024

 Brooke Kate, New York Post; Millions of people are creating nude images of pretty much anyone in minutes using AI bots in a ‘nightmarish scenario’

"Online chatbots are generating nude images of real people at users’ requests, prompting concern from experts who worry the explicit deepfakes will create “a very nightmarish scenario.”

A Wired investigation on the messaging app Telegram unearthed dozens of AI-powered chatbots that allegedly “create explicit photos or videos of people with only a couple clicks,” the outlet reported. Some “remove clothes” from images provided by users, according to Wired, while others say they can manufacture X-rated photos of people engaging in sexual activity.

The outlet estimated that approximately 4 million users per month take advantage of the deepfake capabilities from the chatbots, of which there were an estimated 50. Such generative AI bots promised to deliver “anything you want about the face or clothes of the photo you give me,” Wired reported."

Anyone Can Turn You Into an AI Chatbot. There's Little You Can Do to Stop Them.; Wired, October 15, 2024

Megan Farokhmanesh, Lauren Goode, Wired; Anyone Can Turn You Into an AI Chatbot. There's Little You Can Do to Stop Them.