Generative artificial intelligence is poison for human creativity, according to conventional media wisdom. “Plagiarism machines” is how Breaking Bad author Vince Gilligan has described the large language models (LLMs) used to train the likes of ChatGPT and Claude.
Hundreds of copyright claims have been filed against AI companies – from Stable Diffusion (sued by Getty Images) to Midjourney (sued by a group of artists). Most famous is the New York Times vs Open AI case, which many lawyers think raises such conundrums that it might go to the US Supreme Court.
Sony Music fired off 700 legal letters to AI companies threatening retribution for any music theft. Many artists have been similarly concerned, not least Hollywood actors who went on strike in 2023 about AI (in part). While they secured rather insecure controls about use of their likeness, the bigger threat isn’t so much an AI copying their face as inventing replacements from the 30 billion templates available.
