It's a common belief that the law often has to play catchup with technology, and this remains apparent today as the latter continues to evolve at a fast pace. With the advent of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI), for instance, some important legal questions still need to be addressed. First, policymakers must decide how to best balance the use of data to train AI models with the need to protect the rights of creators, said Jeth Lee, chief legal officer for Microsoft Singapore. Also: Generative AI brings new risks to everyone. Here's how you can stay safe Choosing one extreme can stifle or kill innovation in AI, but it's also not possible to allow free-for-all access to all content and data, Lee said in a video interview.

The joint lawsuit accuses the company of "capitalizing and profiting" from the unauthorized use of their content for ChatGPT. The legal action was filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. The plaintiffs include CBC/Radio-Canada, Postmedia, Metroland, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press. They're seeking punitive damages from OpenAI, payments for any profits the ChatGPT creator made from using their news articles and a ban on further use of their content. "OpenAI is capitalizing and profiting from the use of this content, without getting permission or compensating content owners."

New Delhi/Kolkata, India – A pair of black Dandy Pik Pik loafers covered in sharp, uneven spikes and shiny studs was part of the evidence before Judge Pratibha M Singh in an intellectual-property lawsuit brought by French luxury shoe brand Christian Louboutin against an Indian shoe manufacturer in a Delhi high court last year. Louboutin's lawyers had already regaled the court with anecdotes about the iconic status of their shoes. The signature stilettos, with their luxuriant red soles, had starred in movies like The Devil Wears Prada and Sex and The City, and were registered as a trademark in India and other countries, they said. Riding on the brand's reputation, the lawyers were now trying to make the point that spiked shoes, too, were unique to Christian Louboutin, and the defendant, Shutiq – The Shoe Boutique, was manufacturing and selling their designs in India illegally. Incriminating evidence presented to Judge Singh included testimony from ChatGPT, saying that Christian Louboutin is known for spiked men's shoes. Then there were photographs of Shutiq's 26 spiked and bedazzled shoes next to Louboutin originals, including Dandy Pik Pik.

First reported by TechCrunch, counsel for the Times and its co-plaintiff Daily News sent a letter to the judge overseeing the case, detailing how "an entire week's worth of its experts' and lawyers' work" was "irretrievably lost." According to the letter, on Nov. 14, "programs and search result data stored on one of the dedicated virtual machines was erased by OpenAI engineers." The case hinges on the Times being able to prove that OpenAI's models copied and used its content without compensation or credit. OpenAI was able to recover most of the erased data, but the "folder structure and file names" of the work was unrecoverable, rendering the data unusable. Now, the plaintiffs' counsel must start their evidence gathering from scratch.

The US Patent and Trademark Office banned the use of generative artificial intelligence for any purpose last year, citing security concerns with the technology as well as the propensity of some tools to exhibit "bias, unpredictability, and malicious behavior," according to an April 2023 internal guidance memo obtained by WIRED through a public records request. Jamie Holcombe, the chief information officer of the USPTO, wrote that the office is "committed to pursuing innovation within our agency" but are still "working to bring these capabilities to the office in a responsible way." Paul Fucito, press secretary for the USPTO, clarified to WIRED that employees can use "state-of-the-art generative AI models" at work--but only inside the agency's internal testing environment. "Innovators from across the USPTO are now using the AI Lab to better understand generative AI's capabilities and limitations and to prototype AI-powered solutions to critical business needs," Fucito wrote in an email. Outside of the testing environment, USPTO staff are barred from relying on AI programs like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude for work tasks.

Editor's note: This analysis is part of The Atlantic's investigation into the OpenSubtitles data set. You can access the search tool directly here. Find The Atlantic's search tool for books used to train AI here. For as long as generative-AI chatbots have been on the internet, Hollywood writers have wondered if their work has been used to train them. The chatbots are remarkably fluent with movie references, and companies seem to be training them on all available sources.

OpenAI has notched a victory in its ongoing legal fight against publishers over how its AI tools use creative work. OpenAI argued that the publishers had no legal standing to bring this claim, stating they failed to offer proof that ChatGPT was trained on their material, let alone that the training was harmful. Judge Colleen McMahon of the US Southern District of New York agreed with OpenAI's argument, dismissing the case for lack of standing. "We build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal precedents," says OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom. Although this is a major setback for Alternet and Raw Story, it's not necessarily the end.

Abba's Björn Ulvaeus, the actor Julianne Moore, the Radiohead singer Thom Yorke are among 10,500 signatories of a statement from the creative industries warning artificial intelligence companies that unlicensed use of their work is a "major, unjust threat" to artists' livelihoods. "The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted," reads the statement. Thousands of creative professionals from the worlds of literature, music, film, theatre and television have given their backing to the statement, with authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Ann Patchett, and Kate Mosse, musicians including the Cure's Robert Smith as well as the composer Max Richter and actors including Kevin Bacon, Rosario Dawson and F Murray Abraham. The organiser of the letter, the British composer and former AI executive Ed Newton-Rex, said people who make a living from creative work are "very worried" about the situation. "There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two – sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third – training data – for free," he said.

The Wall Street Journal's parent company, Dow Jones, and the New York Post are suing AI-powered search startup Perplexity for using their content to train its large language models. "This suit is brought by news publishers who seek redress for Perplexity's brazen scheme to compete for readers while simultaneously freeriding on the valuable content the publishers produce," the publishers wrote in their complaint, according to the Journal. They cited an instance wherein the service allegedly served up the entirety of a New York Post piece when the user typed in "Can you provide the fultext of that article." In addition, the publications are accusing Perplexity of harming their brand by citing information that never appeared on their websites. The company's AI can hallucinate, they explained, and add incorrect details.

A lover of magazines may find a few good reasons to pay attention to AFM, a new publication about sex and relationships. It's also the latest in a long line of magazines to exist only because of the largesse of a tech company. AFM stands for both "A Fucking Magazine" and "A Feeld Magazine"--that second one a reference to the dating app that is funding the enterprise. Feeld started its life in 2014 specifically to facilitate threesomes. It was originally called 3nder, pronounced "Thrinder," which quickly led the company to receive a trademark-infringement complaint from Tinder.