Is it too late for us to fight Artificial Intelligence over copyright?

This month I celebrated 20 years of employment (not consistently, but mostly, save the cashing in of my pension to visit Cambodia to try to “find myself”). On June 1 2004, I started as an intern at Men’s Health magazine and loved that I would be getting paid to write for a well-known mag (though my first assignment was creating slogans for coffee cups as part of a Vida e Caffè cross-promotion).

Also this month (horribly and coincidentally) the parent company of Men’s Health closed most of its print newspapers. The tabloid township paper, the Daily Sun, had dropped from 283,216 to 11,889 in circulation in the past 10 years (thanks to The Outlier for the figures). So, it makes business sense to close the print versions, but the digital strategies for these brands are sparse at best. And what does it mean for a publication to go “digital” in the age of AI?

I have been prattling on about print publications needing digital strategies for years, but in the wake of the AI company Perplexity last week being caught blatantly scraping and stealing content without credit, I can imagine that the case isn’t as compelling now.

Perplexity used Forbes’ journalism without credit and ignored the Robots Exclusion Protocol (a standard that sounds cool but is just a way for websites to tell web crawlers that they can’t be accessed or scanned).

Today, is a “digital strategy” simply creating more swill to fill the AI trough? And are any of us going to be able to sue these huge tech companies for copyright before it’s too late?

Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at the New York University’s Stern School of Business, said the important part out loud last week (on the podcast, The Town) when he questioned why scriptwriters and Disney executives aren’t joining forces to sue these tech companies into the ground over copyright.

Some moves are indeed being made: The New York Times, Forbes and others are saying that they have evidence (from using their own LLMs) that AI companies are crawling their IP and not paying them. Because, realistically, these companies that produce content should be able to participate in the upside.

Meanwhile, Nvidia (which manufactures the chips needed in AI processing) has added the total market cap of the global film industry to its total in just the past three weeks, according to Galloway. The high demand for these chips has made Nvidia one of the richest companies in the world.

Galloway says the newspapers shouldn’t be doing all this solo. They need to team up with all content creators. And every day they should send out a press release saying where copyright has been infringed upon and how they don’t like it.

Also, there is precedent: a radio station sends cash to artists every year for being able to play their music on the air, and so we need to take that model to AI scraping and force the companies into an agreement so they pay for every scrape before it’s too late. 

The wheels, though, are turning in the music industry: record labels are suing two AI startups for copyright infringement. The cases are against Suno, the developer of Suno AI, and Uncharted Labs, the developer of Udio AI. A quick test of Suno AI should be all it takes to find them guilty. I created a song with the prompt: “Create a song with a loud angry man singing about ice cream” – it came up with the song “Cold Rage”.

Written, composed and produced by AI in seconds, I particularly like the bridge: “Rage so cold but fire inside / Need that chill to feel alive / Ice cream lover hear my plea / Don’t you dare take it away from me”.

If I were going to be dramatic, I would say the reason this isn’t working is that creatives, journalists and artists are all pointing in different directions, trying to make sure they don’t get crushed by what is coming. 

Think of how magazines got obliterated by Google and social media because they settled for scraps when they should have been using lawyers to keep the whole meal. Let’s not see that happen again.DM

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