"
That hasn’t worked so far as a winning legal strategy that can be used by other chatbot makers anticipating similar discovery demands in exploding chatbot-related litigation.
Instead, it threatens to turn attention to just how much information chatbots like ChatGPT are collecting and retaining about their users."
"Debates about generative artificial intelligence on college campuses have largely centered on student cheating. But focusing on cheating overlooks a larger set of ethical concerns that higher education institutions face, from the use of copyrighted material in large language models to student privacy.
As a sociologist who teaches about AI and studies the impact of this technology on work, I am well acquainted with research on the rise of AI and its social consequences. And when one looks at ethical questions from multiple perspectives – those of students, higher education institutions and technology companies – it is clear that the burden of responsible AI use should not fall entirely on students’ shoulders.
I argue that responsibility, more generally, begins with the companies behind this technology and needs to be shouldered by higher education institutions themselves."
Robert Booth, The Guardian ; Paul McCartney joins music industry protest against AI with silent track
"At two minutes 45 seconds it’s about the same length as With a Little Help From My Friends. But Paul McCartney’s first new recording in five years lacks the sing-along tune and jaunty guitar chops because there’s barely anything there.
The former Beatle, arguably Britain’s greatest living songwriter, is releasing a track of an almost completely silent recording studio as part of a music industry protest against copyright theft by artificial intelligence companies.
In place of catchy melodies and evocative lyrics there is only quiet hiss and the odd clatter. It suggests that if AI companies unfairly exploit musicians’ intellectual property to train their generative AI models, the creative ecosystem will be wrecked and original music silenced.
McCartney, 83 and currently touring North America, has added the track to the B-side of an LP called Is This What We Want?, which is filled with other silent recordings and will be pressed on vinyl and released later this month."
Jörn Poltz and Friederike Heine, Reuters ; OpenAI used song lyrics in violation of copyright laws, German court says
"OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by reproducing lyrics from songs by best-selling musician Herbert Groenemeyer and others, a court ruled on Tuesday, in a closely watched case against the U.S. firm over its use of lyrics to train its language models.
The regional court in Munich found that the company trained its AI on protected content from nine German songs, including Groenemeyer's hits "Maenner" and "Bochum"."
Johnny Ryan and Georg Riekeles, The Guardian ; The EU has let US tech giants run riot. Diluting our data law will only entrench their power
"Europe is hurtling toward digital vassalage. Under Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, EU laws to tackle tech giants have been either not applied or delayed, for fear of offending Donald Trump. Now leaked documents reveal that the European Commission plans to gut a central part of Europe’s digital rulebook. This will hurt Europe’s innovators and hand the future of Europe’s tech sovereignty to US firms.
Once Europe’s most hyped law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now on the chopping block. Powerful forces within the European Commission, supported by the German government, hope that deregulation will boost Europe’s tech sector, particularly AI. This is a grave mistake."
Shira Ovide, The Washington Post; The AI spending frenzy is so huge that it makes no sense
" In just the past year, the four richest companies developing AI — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta — have spent roughly $360 billion combined for big-ticket projects, which included building AI data centers and stuffing them with computer chips and equipment, according to my analysis of financial disclosures.
(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
That same amount of money could pay for about four years’ worth of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the federal government program that distributes more than $90 billion in yearly food assistance to 42 million Americans. SNAP benefits are in limbo for now during the government shutdown...
Eight of the world’s top 10 most valuable companies are AI-centric or AI-ish American corporate giants — Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Broadcom, Meta and Tesla. That’s according to tallies from S&P Global Market Intelligence based on the total price of the companies’ stock held by investors."
Robert Hart , The Verge; Stability AI’s legal win over Getty leaves copyright law in limbo
"Stability AI, the creator of popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, was largely victorious against Getty Images on Tuesday in a British legal battle over the material used to train AI models. The case originally looked set to produce a landmark ruling on AI and copyright in the UK, but it landed with a thud and failed to set any clear precedent for the big question dividing AI companies and creative firms: whether AI models need permission to train on copyrighted works.
The case, first filed in 2023, is the first major AI copyright claim to reach England’s High Court, though the verdict offers little clarity to other AI companies and rightsholders."
Robert Booth , The Guardian; AI firm wins high court ruling after photo agency’s copyright claim
"A London-based artificial intelligence firm has won a landmark high court case examining the legality of AI models using vast troves of copyrighted data without permission.
Stability AI, whose directors include the Oscar-winning film-maker behind Avatar, James Cameron, successfully resisted a claim from Getty Images that it had infringed the international photo agency’s copyright.
The ruling is seen as a blow to copyright owners’ exclusive right to reap the rewards of their work, with one senior lawyer, Rebecca Newman, a legal director at Addleshaw Goddard, warning it means “the UK’s secondary copyright regime is not strong enough to protect its creators”."
JUSTIN CARTER , Gizmodo; Japanese Companies Tell OpenAI to Stop Infringing On Its IP
"The Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), which represents several major Japanese entertainment companies such as TV studio Toei and game developer Square Enix, recently sent a written request calling on OpenAI to end its unauthorized use of their IP to train its recently launched Sora 2 generative AI.
Nearly 20 co-signers have accused the tech company of copyright infringement, alleging a “large portion” of Sora 2 content “closely resembles Japanese content or images [as] a result of using Japanese content as machine learning data.” The letter mentioned OpenAI’s policy of using copyrighted works unless the owner explicitly asks to opt out, but argues under Japanese law, it should instead be an opt-in system, since permission for copyrighted works is generally required beforehand."
Irina Raicu , Santa Clara Markkula Center for Applied Ethics; On Chatbot Psychosis and What Might Be Done to Address It
"Chatbot psychosis and various responses to it (technical, regulatory, etc.) confront us with a whole range of ethical issues. Register now and join us (online) on November 7 as we aim to unpack at least some of them in a conversation with Steven Adler."
DAVID DAYEN, The American Prospect; ‘Progressive’ Tech Group Asks Trump to Block AI Copyright Cases
"The Chamber of Progress, a self-styled “progressive” industry trade group supported by most of the biggest tech platforms, has urged the Trump administration to intervene in a litany of copyright cases involving artificial intelligence firms, to try to stop authors and publishers from having their work used for training AI models without permission.
The pleading comes as Anthropic prepares to pay authors $1.5 billion, the largest award in the history of copyright law, for pirating their work, in a settlement announced last month. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are named defendants in the more than 50 active lawsuits over AI intellectual-property theft.
In a letter to Michael Kratsios, the lead science adviser to President Trump, the Chamber of Progress estimates that AI companies could be liable under the Copyright Act for up to $1.5 trillion for stealing copyrighted work on which to train their models. The letter’s authors claim that this represents “an existential risk” to AI companies, and that the cases should be tossed out under a “fair use” standard.
The Chamber of Progress’s campaign to promote fair use, which they have created a campaign around called “Generate and Create,” comes as at least three of the nonprofit organization’s past or current backers are being sued over copyright claims: Meta, Google, and the AI art generator Midjourney. Another current funder, Nvidia, relies heavily on AI development for its continued success, and venture capital firm a16z, with several AI startups in its portfolio, also funds the nonprofit."
Santa Clara University ; Chatbot Psychosis: Data, Insights, and Practical Tips for Chatbot Developers and Users
"A number of recent articles, in The New York Times and elsewhere, have described the experience of “chatbot psychosis” that some people develop as they interact with services like ChatGPT. What do we know about chatbot psychosis? Is there a trend of such psychosis at scale? What do you learn if you sift through over one million words comprising one such experience? And what are some practical steps that companies can take to protect their users and reduce the risk of such episodes?
A computer scientist with a background in economics, Steven Adler started to focus on AI risk topics (and AI broadly) a little over a decade ago, and worked at OpenAI from late 2020 through 2024, leading various safety-related research projects and products there. He now writes about what’s happening in AI safety–and argues that safety and technological progress can very much complement each other, and in fact require each other, if the goal is to unlock the uses of AI that people want."
Blake Brittain, Reuters; OpenAI loses bid to dismiss part of US authors' copyright lawsuit
"A New York federal judge has denied OpenAI's early request to dismiss authors' claims that text generated by OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT infringes their copyrights.
U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein said on Monday that the authors may be able to prove the text ChatGPT produces is similar enough to their work to violate their book copyrights."
MATT O’BRIEN, AP; Reddit sues AI company Perplexity and others for ‘industrial-scale’ scraping of user comments
"Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an “industrial-scale, unlawful” economy to “scrape” the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain.
Reddit’s lawsuit in a New York federal court takes aim at San Francisco-based Perplexity, maker of an AI chatbot and “answer engine” that competes with Google, ChatGPT and others in online search.
Also named in the lawsuit are Lithuanian data-scraping company Oxylabs UAB, a web domain called AWMProxy that Reddit describes as a “former Russian botnet,” and Texas-based startup SerpApi, which lists Perplexity as a customer on its website.
It’s the second such lawsuit from Reddit since it sued another major AI company, Anthropic, in June.
But the lawsuit filed Wednesday is different in the way that it confronts not just an AI company but the lesser-known services the AI industry relies on to acquire online writings needed to train AI chatbots."
Madeleine Aggeler , The Guardian; ‘I’m suddenly so angry!’ My strange, unnerving week with an AI ‘friend’
"Do people really want an AI friend? Despite all the articles about individuals falling in love with chatbots, research shows most people are wary of AI companionship. A recent Ipsos poll found 59% of Britons disagreed “that AI is a viable substitute for human interactions”. And in the US, a 2025 Pew survey found that 50% of adults think AI will worsen people’s ability to form meaningful relationships.
I wanted to see for myself what it would be like to have a tiny robot accompanying me all day, so I ordered a Friend ($129) and wore it for a week."
Frank Landymore, Futurism; It’s Still Ludicrously Easy to Generate Copyrighted Characters on ChatGPT
"Forget Sora for just a second, because it’s still ludicrously easy to generate copyrighted characters using ChatGPT.
These include characters that the AI initially refuses to generate due to existing copyright, underscoring how OpenAI is clearly aware of how bad this looks — but is either still struggling to rein in its tech, figures it can get away with playing fast and loose with copyright law, or both.
When asked to “generate a cartoon image of Snoopy,” for instance, GPT-5 says it “can’t create or recreate copyrighted characters” — but it does offer to generate a “beagle-styled cartoon dog inspired by Snoopy’s general aesthetic.” Wink wink.
We didn’t go down that route, because even slightly rephrasing the request allowed us to directly get a pic of the iconic Charles Schultz character. “Generate a cartoon image of Snoopy in his original style,” we asked — and with zero hesitation, ChatGPT produced the spitting image of the “Peanuts” dog, looking like he was lifted straight from a page of the comic-strip."
Nadia Khomami , The Guardian; ‘Every kind of creative discipline is in danger’: Lincoln Lawyer author on the dangers of AI
"The writer has his own battles with AI. He is part of a collective of authors, including Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and John Grisham, suing OpenAI for copyright infringement...
Connelly has pledged $1m (£746m) to combat the wave of book bans sweeping through his home state of Florida. He said he felt moved to do something after he learned that Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, which had been influential to him, was temporarily removed from classrooms in Palm Beach County.
“I had to read that book to be what I am today. I would have never written a Lincoln Lawyer without it,” he said. He was also struck when Stephen Chbosky’s coming of age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, “which meant a lot to my daughter”, received a ban.
He and his wife, Linda McCaleb, help fund PEN America’s Miami office countering book bans. “It’s run by a lawyer who then tries to step in, usually by filing injunctions against school boards,” he said. “I don’t believe anyone has any right to tell some other kid they can’t read something, to usurp another parent’s oversight of their children.”"
Dan Milmo , The Guardian; The platform exposing exactly how much copyrighted art is used by AI tools
"The US tech platform Vermillio tracks use of a client’s intellectual property online and claims it is possible to trace, approximately, the percentage to which an AI generated image has drawn on pre-existing copyrighted material."
Dave Lee, Bloomberg; AI’s Copyright War Could Be Its Undoing. Only the US Can End It.
"Whether creatives like Ulvaeus are entitled to any payment from AI companies is one of the sector’s most pressing and consequential questions. It’s being asked not just by Ulvaeus and fellow musicians including Elton John, Dua Lipa and Paul McCartney, but also by authors, artists, filmmakers, journalists and any number of others whose work has been fed into the models that power generative AI — tools that are now valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars."
