AI This Week: One of the Music Industry’s Biggest Labels is Suing Anthropic

Headlines This Week

• Major newspapers are trying to carve out a deal with AI firms, as an argument brews over the copyrighted material that said firms have used to train their content-generating algorithms.
• NYC Mayor Eric Adams has found the certifiably most annoying use of AI, which is to spam city residents with automated robocalls. Well done, dude!
• Last but not least: The Daily Beast has a really interesting article looking at the intersection between cybercrime and large language models.

The Top Story: The Creative Industry’s Ongoing War with AI

If there’s one thing that’s become clear in recent months, it’s that generative AI is, actually, authentically, disruptive. For years, “disruption” has been a popular buzzword in Silicon Valley, meant to signal world-changing innovation. Most of the time, there’s little justification for using the term. Not so with AI. This is a technology that is genuinely disrupting large parts of society and, as a result, it also seems to be pissing a lot of people off.

Case in point: Universal Music Group, one of the music industry’s most powerful labels, filed a $75 million lawsuit against prominent AI firm Anthropic this week. The lawsuit, which accuses Anthropic of “systematic and widespread infringement of…[artists’] copyrighted song lyrics,” is one of the largest lawsuits of its kind to be filed yet. UMG represents droves of the biggest commercial artists in the world, including Drake, The Weeknd, and Taylor Swift, and has considerable influence in the entertainment industry.

Anthropic, meanwhile, isn’t a small company, either. The firm, which was founded by a slew of former OpenAI staffers, has launched its own chatbot, Claude, which is among the most popular on the market today. The company has also received a significant chunk of change from powerful tech giants, including Amazon (to the tune of $4 billion), and Google (which invested hundreds of millions into the startup), and it even previously took in quite a bit of money—some $500 million—from Alameda Research, the investment firm run by FTX accused criminal Sam Bankman-Fried.

In short: Anthropic is a heavy hitter in the emergent AI industry, so it’s interesting that it is now weathering a pretty serious lawsuit from an equally large and powerful corporate giant. It’s a clear sign of how serious the argument is getting when it comes to AI vendors’ use of copyrighted content to train their content-generating algorithms. Clearly this isn’t the first copyright-related lawsuit to emerge related to AI-generated content; indeed, there have been droves of them. The difference is the degree to which this lawsuit seems to have a certain amount of weight behind it due to the plaintiff. 

Question of the Day: What’s the problem with Jon Stewart?

This week, Jon Stewart’s political comedy show, The Problem, with Jon Stewart, was abruptly canceled by Apple. The word on the street is that Stewart’s show was cancelled because he wanted to do an episode on AI and China. The Verge characterized the show’s death as the result of “editorial disagreements with Apple” over the subject matter, though there aren’t really any details about what those disagreements looked like. That said, Stewart’s show had also not been doing particularly well. The ratings were not good and critical reception of the series had also been pretty “bleh.” Still, the notion that Apple may have cancelled the show partially because Jon verged on being too critical of AI is enough to make you worried for the future of media.

Alas, no interview this week! I unfortunately just did not have the time to schedule one. We promise to chat with someone fascinating next week though, as per usual.

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