by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:

(Truthout) In recent months, a number of novelists, artists and newspapers have sued generative artificial intelligence (AI) companies for taking a “free ride” on their content. These suits allege that the companies, which use that content to train their machine learning models, may be breaking copyright laws.

From the tech industry’s perspective, this content mining is necessary in order to build the AI tools that tech companies say will supposedly benefit all of us. In a recent statement to legislative bodies, OpenAI claimed that “it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.” It remains to be seen if courts will agree, but it’s not looking good for content creators. In February, a California court dismissed large portions of a case brought by Sarah Silverman and other authors.