When AI meets IP: Can artists sue AI imitators?

Ben and Ceora talk through some thorny issues around AI-generated music and art, explain why creators are suing AI companies for copyright infringement, and compare notes on the most amusing/alarming AI-generated content making the rounds (Pope coat, anyone?).

Episode notes:

Getty Images is suing the company behind AI art generator Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement, accusing the company of copying 12 million images without permission or compensation to train its AI model.

Meanwhile, a group of artists is suing the companies behind Midjourney, DreamUp, and Stable Diffusion for “scraping and collaging” their work to train AI models. 

One of those artists, Sarah Anderson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about seeing her comics gobbled up by AI models and regurgitated as far-right memes.

Speaking of copyright violations, did Vanilla Ice really steal that hook from David Bowie and Freddie Mercury? (Yes.)

Check out the AI model trained on Kanye’s voice that sounds almost indistinguishable from Ye himself.

Read The Verge’s deep dive into the intersection of AI-generated music and IP/copyright laws.

Watch the AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that’s been called “the natural end point for AI development.”

ICYMI: The Pope coat was real in our hearts.

Columbia University’s Data Science Institute recently wrote about how blockchain can give creators more control over their IP, now that AI-generated art is clearly here to stay.

Congrats to today’s Lifeboat badge winner, herohuyongtao, for answering How can I add a prebuilt static library in a project using CMake?.