TechnologyMicrosoft, OpenAI and GitHub ask a court to dismiss a lawsuit against an AI for copyright

Microsoft, OpenAI and GitHub ask a court to dismiss a lawsuit against an AI for copyright

The content generation tools by artificial intelligence (IA) have been arousing both interest and concern for several months —if not years. In September of last year, for example, several communities dedicated to art decided to definitively ban the AI generated images in their online repositories.

As these groups defended then, by making this decision they sought to “maintain the focus on art made by people” and “support the artists and their content”, something that was not in keeping with continuing to offer a space to those works that had been created using tools like midjourney, stable diffusion either Dall-E.

The artists themselves, observing the rise of these technologies, denounced that They were between a rock and a hard place: They couldn’t sell these tools their copyrights, but they couldn’t deny that they were based on their work either because their algorithms had already included them without consent.

“They are IP washing machines and moral rights, they attack the author, and this can be a great enemy of entrepreneurship in the long term”, recently expressed the conceptual artist Jon Juarez in an interview for Business Insider Spain.

Stable Diffusion and Midjourney face a copyright lawsuit: a trio of artists denounce the theft of their works by this AI

Artwork generated by artificial intelligence. Artwork generated by artificial intelligence.

However, this problem not only affects graphic artists, but also concerns dubbing actors, radio hosts and even programmers. This is the case of Matthew Butterick, a lawyer and programmer who, according to The Vergein November last year already filed a class action lawsuit against Copilot.

Copilot is a tool that is publicly available on GitHub —platform owned by Microsoftt— and that takes advantage of OpenAI technology —a firm in which Microsoft has also invested— to generate and suggest lines of code directly within a programmer’s editor.

Butterick defends that Copilot exists because it is based on “software piracy on an unprecedented scale” and, in addition to his first complaint, he has already filed a second lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI.

As published The Verge, the 3 companies have now asked the court investigating the case to dismiss Butterick’s second complaint. According to them, because “it suffers from 2 intrinsic defects: the lack of damage and the lack of a viable claim.” They maintain that the lawsuit is based on “hypothetical events” and that it does not describe how the plaintiffs have been harmed.

“Copilot does not subtract anything from the source code that is available on the Internet,” Microsoft and GitHub point out in the statement they address to the court. “Rather, Copilot helps developers code by generating suggestions based on what it has learned from all the knowledge gleaned from the code that is publicly available.”

For now, the court hearing in which it will be decided whether to dismiss the lawsuit will take place next May. Even so, numerous experts have already pointed out how dangerous tools like Copilot are in terms of cybersecurity, since it is possible to “intoxicate” their databases so that they “recommend” malicious code to programmers.

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