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An illustration of the ChatGPT logo on a phone screen, along with the US flag and court gavel.
OpenAI scores a copyright win in court
A federal judge in Manhattan last Thursday threw out a lawsuit filed by the news outlets Raw Story and AlterNet against OpenAI, alleging that the artificial intelligence startup behind ChatGPT used its articles improperly to train large language models.
Colleen McMahon, a Clinton-appointed judge in the Southern District of New York, said the plaintiffs weren’t able to demonstrate harm, though she dismissed the case without prejudice, meaning they could file a new suit in the future and try once again to establish legal standing.
The lawsuit, filed in February, didn’t allege that OpenAI engaged in copyright infringement. That was the allegation made by other news organizations including the New York Times, which sued OpenAI in December 2023 in an ongoing suit. Instead, it claimed that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by removing authors’ names and other identifying information.
It’s a small win for OpenAI as it faces a litany of copyright lawsuits from people and companies eager to prove in court that one of the richest and buzziest companies in the world got rich by stealing other people’s copyrighted work.
Gavel in a courtroom
Repercussions come for AI-generated child porn
The case is novel. It’s the first time that the federal government has brought charges for child porn fully generated by AI. The government said that Anderegg created a trove of 13,000 fake images using the text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion, made by the company Stability AI, along with certain add-ons to the technology. This isn’t the first blow-up involving Stable Diffusion, though. In December, Stanford University researchers found that the dataset LAION-5B, used by Stable Diffusion, included 1,679 illegal images of child sexual abuse material.
This case could set a new precedent for an open question: Is AI-generated child pornography — for all intents and purposes under the law — child pornography?
Russian Deputy Defence Minister Timur Ivanov inspects the construction of apartment blocks in Mariupol, Russian-controlled Ukraine, in this October 2022 image.
Shocked! Russian deputy defense minister jailed for graft
Russian authorities this week detained a prominent deputy defense minister on corruption charges. Timur Ivanov, a long-standing close ally of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, oversaw a wide variety of construction and logistics projects for the Russian armed forces, including in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
Anti-corruption activists, including the outfit of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, had long focused on Ivanov’s lavish lifestyle. This is the highest-profile corruption takedown since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Now, if you are shocked – shocked! – that there’s corruption in Russian military contracting, we’ve got news for you: Corruption is rife in the Russian government. Getting busted is usually less about a sudden universal respect for transparency, and more about turf battles within the Russian elite.
Is Shoigu in trouble? Not yet, but note two things. One, he’s heard lots of criticism from pro-war hawks who accuse him of corruption and incompetence in his military strategy. The most prominent of them, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is no longer among the living, but the grumblings continue. Second, in just a few weeks, Vladimir Putin will be reinaugurated and will have to name a new cabinet. If Shoigu really is in any trouble, that’s when it will become clear.