Steven Lieberman and Jennifer Maisel Appear on The People's AI Podcast to Discuss AI Copyright Litigations and Fair Use of Creative Content
Partners Steven Lieberman and Jennifer Maisel made an appearance on The People's AI: The Decentralized AI Podcast with Jeff Wilser in an episode titled "From Nude Robot Photos to The New York Times Suing OpenAI: How AI Feeds on Your Data, Your Life." In the episode, focused on the real stakes of AI and data, Steven and Jen walk through The New York Times’ landmark lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, and why they see it as a fight over whether copyrighted work, and the broader creative economy, can simply be ingested as free raw material for AI. The discussion explores what this means not just for journalists, but for anyone whose job involves producing text, images, music, or other digital output.
"At the core of the case is the use of The Times' intellectual property for training the large language models, the AI models at the heart of these chatbots, and training those models on copyrighted content so that those models can in turn, through these chat bots, output content that directly competes with and substitutes original news reporting," Jen explained.
"If what OpenAI and Microsoft have done is held to be fair use...what you write isn't going to be yours anymore. Somebody else is going to be making money from it," Steven noted.
Kicking off the podcast's 3rd season, the episode also explores AI and data in our homes and across society. The episode starts with a story from a MIT Technology Review senior reporter who uncovered how images from “smart” robot vacuums ended up in a Facebook group for overseas gig workers labeling training data. Next, what did this investigation reveal about how AI systems are actually trained, who’s doing the invisible labor of data labeling, and how consent quietly gets stretched (or broken) along the way? A professor from Information School, University of Wisconsin, explains how seemingly mundane data feeds powerful surveillance infrastructures and tests the limits of long-standing privacy protections. Finally, the chairman of the Advanced AI Society argues that control of our data is now inseparable from individual agency itself.
To listen to the The People's AI: The Decentralized AI Podcast episode, "From Nude Robot Photos to The New York Times Suing OpenAI: How AI Feeds on Your Data, Your Life," please visit YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
