A bipartisan group of senators introduced a new bill to make it easier to authenticate and detect artificial intelligence-generated content and protect journalists and artists from having their work gobbled up by AI models without their permission.
The Content Origin Protection and Integrity from Edited and Deepfaked Media Act (COPIED Act) would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create standards and guidelines that help prove the origin of content and detect synthetic content, like through watermarking. It also directs the agency to create security measures to prevent tampering and requires AI tools for creative or journalistic content to let users attach information about their origin and prohibit that information from being removed. Under the bill, such content also could not be used to train AI models.
Content owners, including broadcasters, artists, and newspapers, could sue companies they believe used their materials without permission or tampered with authentication markers. State attorneys general and the Federal Trade Commission could also enforce the bill, which its backers say prohibits anyone from “removing, disabling, or tampering with content provenance information” outside of an exception for some security research purposes.
(A copy of the bill is in he article, here is the important part imo:
Prohibits the use of “covered content” (digital representations of copyrighted works) with content provenance to either train an AI- /algorithm-based system or create synthetic content without the express, informed consent and adherence to the terms of use of such content, including compensation)
If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models…
China would be the world leader in making AI model trained on copyrighted content
And as the vast majority of content is not licensed for AI model training, they would have an immensely larger dataset to train on.
Well, there is also Europe ✌🏻
No. In the EU, the lobbyists have already won. Major countries, like Germany, have always had very conservative copyright laws. I believe it’s one reason why their cultures are losing so hard.
Surprisingly, Japan has adopted a very sensible law on AI training.
I am just sitting here with my eye twitching thinking of all the code I have had to deal with from German companies over the years.