From the Telegraph:

The owner of ChatGPT and Microsoft have been hit by a $3bn (£2.4bn) class action lawsuit over the alleged theft of data from hundreds of millions of internet users.

The legal claim alleges OpenAI, which built the digital chatbot, and investor Microsoft developed the artificial intelligence tools by “secret scraping of the internet”.

The companies were sued by sixteen anonymous individuals in California and accused of a series of privacy violations, including the theft of private and copyrighted information and “luring thousands if not millions of children to the platform”.

This is overdue, in my opinion. We need to begin rethinking intellectual property in light of artificial intelligence. I’ve not given permission for my work to be used to train robots. Nor have many of my peers, and yet these technologies can produce simulacra and parodies of our work. Clearly this is information that has been scraped from internet sources.

I tend to think we’ve made a huge mistake in treating tasks that computation does at scale as entirely different from tasks when performed by humans. Handing most of the functions of a publisher to software doesn’t make you not a publisher. In my view the only thing that AI can do is a form of advanced plagiarism.