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Most generative AI models likely ‘illegal’, says former Stability VP
AI Mon 4 Mar 2024
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Oscar Hornstein
Senior Reporter
Generative AI illegal
Image credit: Ed Newton-Rex
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The methods used by tech companies to train the majority of generative AI models are likely to be “illegal”, according to a senior executive who stepped down from British startup Stability.

Ed Newton-Rex, who recently resigned as VP of audio at London-based AI unicorn Stability over ethical concerns, told UKTN that the “jury is still out” on whether companies like OpenAI and Google are breaking copyright law by training their models on creators’ data.

Prior to his resignation, Newton-Rex was running Stability AI’s audio department, which was working on a music generation tool. He left Stability because he did not agree with “the company’s opinion that training generative AI models on copyrighted works is “fair use’”.

It comes as rapid advances in generative AI are pushing the limits of copyright law. Intellectual property lawyers say most existing copyright laws were not written with AI in mind.

Newton-Rex said: “The jury’s still out on whether this falls under the fair use exception to copyright law. But my view is that it doesn’t.”

Referring to OpenAI’s recent viral announcement of the video generation tool Sora, Newton-Rex highlighted what he sees as a common strategy by AI companies to avoid admitting they’re using copyrighted content.

“They said we trained on a lot of publicly available content,” Newton-Rex said. “Publicly available does not mean it’s in the public domain – publicly available means literally on the internet.”

He added: “You do not have the right to do anything you want with things on the internet, that is not how copyright works.”

Newton-Rex said this practice is “very widespread” and “a real problem”.

Now running Fairly Trained – a non-profit promoting ethical AI practices – Newton-Rex told UKTN that “most” generative models rely on data sets from copyrighted work that “no one has consented to”.

The legal precedent for AI models using content outside the public domain is still being determined. A handful of high-profile cases are set to cause ripple effects across the industry.

The most high-profile case is the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, which alleges that ChatGPT plagiarised the newspaper’s content. Getty Images, meanwhile, is engaged in a lawsuit against Stability.

Stability has become one of the UK’s most prominent AI companies, recently raising £89m in its Series A round.

The company has previously stated that “AI development is an acceptable, transformative and socially beneficial use of existing content that is protected by fair use”.

Josh Little, a partner at the law firm Marriott Harrison told UKTN: “The debate over whether or not the training of large language models on unlicensed data is illegal does not come gift-wrapped with a straightforward answer. But it’s also not a question that’s going away any time soon.”

UK’s AI approach is ‘naïve’
AI technology crosses geopolitical borders, adding to the complexity of establishing how copyright law should be applied in the age of AI. Newton-Rex believes the UK’s approach to AI policy is “incredibly lazy” and “naïve”.

The UK government has repeatedly stated it does not plan to legislate AI in the “short term”, instead hoping that a light-touch regulatory approach will help establish Britain as an AI powerhouse.

“It’s an incredibly lazy approach,” said Newton-Rex. “It’s a naive approach because it ignores the fact that you can have AI development, and you can have fair treatment of creatives.”

Newton-Rex said there doesn’t need to be new legislation to protect artists, writers and other content creators.

“Just make it clear that training in this way is not permitted under the law,” he said. “You don’t need a new law for that, you just point to an existing law and say no, that’s not permitted.”

Topics
Ed Newton-Rex
Fairly Trained
generative ai
OpenAI
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