Mainstream media calls for US action to stop "AI theft" by companies like OpenAI

Several publishers under the News/Media Alliance have called on the US government to "make Big Tech pay for the content it takes to run its AI products."

These publishers, which include notable giants like The New York Times, The Guardian, and more, launched a campaign entitled "Support Responsible AI," accusing Big Tech of stealing the creative work of others to build AI products without compensating the creators.

The campaign's main website calls this form of stealing "un-American and wrong."

Big Tech companies are stealing content from creators of all types to fuel AI. America’s creative industries are part of what make this country great, and stealing their work is un-American and wrong. Tell Washington today to make Big Tech companies pay for the content they take.

The ad campaign features attention-grabbing red-and-white banners containing phrases like "Protect Jobs from AI Theft," "AI Steals from You Too," "Keep Watch on AI," and more.

As we settle into the new week, expect to see these banners in "hundreds of news publications and digital outlets" across the US. The campaign has three main requests from the US government:

• Require Big Tech and AI companies to fairly compensate content creators.
• Mandate transparency, sourcing, and attribution in AI-generated content.
• Prevent monopolies from engaging in coercive and anti-competitive practices.

President and CEO of News/Media Alliance Danielle Coffey argues that the news media industry is not necessarily anti-AI. Still, it wants to see a "balanced ecosystem where AI is built responsibly, providing return to the quality content that fuels its intelligence and drives international competitiveness."

This comes several days after OpenAI released a new image-generation tool that went viral for its ability to generate images in the style of the Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli, as well as generate fake receipts.

The image "ghiblification" affair really upset some people, especially artists on X who are pretty anti-AI. Last year, some of them decided to leave the platform altogether because X chose to train AI on user posts.

They switched to alternatives like BlueSky, where, wait for it, a machine learning librarian at Hugging Face actually caught heat after releasing a dataset made from publicly available BlueSky posts for anyone to train their models on.

OpenAI and other AI labs have clashed with members of the News/Media Alliance in the past. A notable example is The New York Times's December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging unauthorized use of its articles for AI training. Just last month, a federal judge ruled that the lawsuit could proceed, rejecting OpenAI's request to dismiss.