Outcry Against AI Companies Grows Over Who Controls Internet’s Content

A collective cry is breaking out as authors, artists and internet publishers realize that the generative-AI phenomenon sweeping the globe is built partly on the back of their work. The emerging awareness has set up a war between the forces behind the inputs and the outputs of these new artificial-intelligence tools, over whether and how content originators should be compensated. The disputes threaten to throw sand into the gears of the AI boom just as it seems poised to revolutionize the global economy. Artificial-intelligence companies including OpenAI, its backer Microsoft, and Google built generative-AI systems such as ChatGPT by scraping oceans of information from the internet and feeding it into training algorithms that teach the systems to imitate human speech. The companies generally say their data use without compensation is permitted, but they have left the door open to discussing the issue with content creators. Thousands of authors including Margaret Atwood and James Patterson signed an open letter demanding that top AI companies obtain permission and pay writers for the use of their works to train generative-AI models. Comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors also filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Facebook-parent Meta Platforms for allegedly training their AI models on illegal copies of their books that were captured and left on the internet. News publishers have called the unlicensed use of their content a copyright violation. Some—including Wall Street Journal parent News Corp, Dotdash Meredith owner IAC and publishers of the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Politico—have discussed with tech companies exploring ways they might be paid for the use of their content in AI training, according to people familiar with the matter.