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."
Kevin Roose, The New York Times; Inside the White-Hot Center of A.I. Doomerism
"But the difference is that Anthropic’s employees aren’t just worried that their app will break, or that users won’t like it. They’re scared — at a deep, existential level — about the very idea of what they’re doing: building powerful A.I. models and releasing them into the hands of people, who might use them to do terrible and destructive things.
Many of them believe that A.I. models are rapidly approaching a level where they might be considered artificial general intelligence, or “A.G.I.,” the industry term for human-level machine intelligence. And they fear that if they’re not carefully controlled, these systems could take over and destroy us...
And lastly, he made a moral case for Anthropic’s decision to create powerful A.I. systems, in the form of a thought experiment.
“Imagine if everyone of good conscience said, ‘I don’t want to be involved in building A.I. systems at all,’” he said. “Then the only people who would be involved would be the people who ignored that dictum — who are just, like, ‘I’m just going to do whatever I want.’ That wouldn’t be good.”"
