Publishers are about to form a coalition to claim billions of dollars from AI corporations. Among others: The heavyweights of the New York Times, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Axel Springer.
The details are still sparse at the moment, but it is clear where the journey will lead: A new edition of the dispute over snippets in Google News in the age of artificial intelligence. Back then™, publishers had sued the company for millions, with the result that Google News was temporarily unavailable in many EU countries. Today, Google reached an agreement with the publishers and will pay some of them licenses to use their content. Now the reboot of the franchise is coming to cinemas, because AI systems have a very fundamental problem with copyright as we know it, which goes far beyond an AI-enhanced Google search relegating the links to the sources to the second row thereby reducing traffic to publishers’ websites.
A few weeks ago, in a text on Heise and in my newsletter, I described how the interpolative nature of latent spaces in AI systems is fundamentally incompatible with copy rights: AI synthesis is always an interpolation from different patterns created by the AI learned from their training data. Let’s say an AI learns that dogs like to bark and cats like to meow, both of which are animals. If I now prompt an AI system with an animal, it will produce a meowing, barking, hairy hybrid. This works the same way for text, image and music.
This principle applies to all AI systems, but we are not only dealing with two dimensions of cats and dogs, but with millions and millions of them, the so-called parameters. So far it is completely unclear how collecting societies should react to this atomization of copyrighted culture, even if a consensus is already emerging in which AI companies will at least pay for high-quality training data, such as those that come from publishers. OpenAI recently closed a license deal with AP and more are likely to follow.
To enforce this consensus, the publishers are now forming a new coalition and are already threatening lawsuits. Google News Reloaded – The Interpolation strikes back could become the blockbuster of the 2024 media circus.