The American Matthew Butterick has started a legal crusade against generative artificial intelligence (AI). In 2022, he filed the first lawsuit in the history of this field against Microsoft, one of the companies that develop these types of tools (GitHub Copilot). Today, he’s coordinating four class action lawsuits that bring together complaints filed by programmers, artists and writers.
If successful, he could force the companies responsible for applications such as ChatGPT or Midjourney to compensate thousands of creators. They may even have to retire their algorithms and retrain them with databases that don’t infringe on intellectual property rights.
They will readily agree to this after having made their money and use their ill gotten gains to train a new model. The rest of us will have to go pound sand as making a new model will have been made prohibitively expensive. Good intentions, but it will only help them by pulling up the ladder behind them.
It wouldn’t be pulling up the ladder behind them if we force them to step down that ladder and burn it by retraining their models from scratch “with databases that don’t infringe on intellectual property rights”.