Progress in the fight against unethical AI

Battling for better Two years after generative AI forced its way into the mainstream, Tanya Combrinck looks at the advances activists have made protecting their rights

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In the second half of 2022, when artists discovered that their work had been swept up and used to train models for AI image generators without their consent, it didn’t take long for activists to organise themselves against the practice.

Within months, lawsuits had been filed against the major AI companies, the Concept Art Association had raised over $270,000 through crowdfunding to hire a lobbyist to advocate for creators in Washington D.C., and activists in Europe had formed the European Guild for Artificial Intelligence Regulation (EGAIR), an organisation that lobbies EU lawmakers on behalf of creators.

It’s now been two years since the lawsuits against AI companies began to mount up, and since then political lobbying has got under way both in Europe and the US. So what progress has been made in this time?

The first thing is that the lawsuits have stuck around, despite AI companies’ protestations that they should be thrown out. Many legal cases are ongoing, and the outcome of these will determine what material can be used to train AI models, and under what conditions. Most of the cases allege that use of a plaintiff’s material without their consent constitutes copyright infringement. The AI companies argue that their actions fall within the “fair use” exception to the law.

It’s up to the courts to decide how existing copyright law will be applied to AI, but these cases are making progress, and the fact they’re seen by judges as having sufficient merit to proceed is promising. One of the most important cases in the US has been filed by a group of artists against a string of companies for their use of Stable Diffusion. Follow its progress at http://imagegeneratorlitigation.​com. In the UK, one to watch is Getty Images v Stability AI.