AI Giants Unite Against Proposed Copyright Lawsuit

Good Morning AI Runners 🏃‍♂️

Here's what we've got for you today:

• AI Giants Unite Against Proposed Copyright Lawsuit

• The Pentagon's Revised Directive on Autonomous Weapon Systems

AI Giants Unite Against Proposed Copyright Lawsuit 🔏

It's the wild, wild west in the AI world as lawsuits fly left and right! Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are facing a proposed class action lawsuit that accuses them of scraping licensed code to build GitHub's AI-powered Copilot tool. Copilot, in case you're unfamiliar, is a cool tool that uses OpenAI's tech to suggest lines of code directly within a programmer's code editor. But, here's the twist, the tool was trained on publicly available code from GitHub and that's where the trouble started.

Enter programmer and lawyer, Matthew Butterick, and Joseph Saveri Law Firm, who filed a lawsuit claiming the tool was built on "software piracy on an unprecedented scale." Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI's response? "Hold up! That's not how it went down!" In their court filing, they argue that the complaint "fails on two intrinsic defects: lack of injury and lack of an otherwise viable claim" and that the plaintiffs are relying on "hypothetical events." Microsoft and GitHub even went as far as to say that the plaintiffs are the ones "undermining open source principles" by asking for an injunction and billions of dollars in damages.

The showdown will take place in May, and we can't wait to see what the court decides.

But it's not just Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI who are facing legal issues with AI. Butterick and Joseph Saveri Law Firm filed another lawsuit this month alleging that AI art tools created by MidJourney, stability AI, and DeviantArt violate copyright laws by illegally scraping artists' work from the internet. And to add insult to injury, Getty Images is also suing stability AI over claims that their Stable Diffusion tool scraped images from the site "unlawfully."

AI is going to go through more growing pains as it tries to navigate the legal waters of intellectual property.

The Pentagon's Revised Directive on Autonomous Weapon Systems 🎯

It's time for a little update from the Pentagon and boy, do they have something big to share! They've decided to upgrade their rules on autonomous weapons systems by including AI - can you believe it's been a decade since they last made any changes?

You see, the Pentagon's Directive 3000.09, Autonomy in Weapon Systems, has gotten a fresh new look to keep up with the changing times both in the Department of Defense and in the world. The new guidelines are for the makers of autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons systems to make sure that human commanders are in charge and can have the final say on when to use force.

And because the Pentagon is all about ethical AI usage (lol), they've added a section to make sure any use of AI in these weapons systems must align with the DoD's AI Ethical Principles. These principles were unveiled in 2020 and promote the responsible and transparent use of AI, whether it's in combat or non-combat situations.

To keep things on the straight and narrow, the Pentagon has also added a new senior-level oversight group called the Autonomous Weapon Systems Working Group. These guys will be tasked with checking if a weapon system is up to snuff and advising the DoD officials if it needs approvals before it can be deployed.

And in case you were wondering, the directive doesn't stop anyone from developing any particular weapon system. Currently, there are no global laws or rules to limit the development or deployment of autonomous weapons of war. In 2021, the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons proposed a ban on these weapons, but it didn't pass after most major powers voted it down. The U.S. invested $18 billion in researching autonomous weapons systems from 2016 to 2020, and you know what they say, when the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold…….

Pic of the day:

That's it from RunTheAI for today.

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