Something strange has been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks. After being uploaded, some videos have been subtly augmented, their appearance changing without their creators doing anything. Viewers have noticed “extra punchy shadows,” “weirdly sharp edges,” and a smoothed-out look to footage that makes it look “like plastic.” Many people have come to the same conclusion: YouTube is using AI to tweak videos on its platform, without creators’ knowledge.
Should tech companies have free access to copyrighted books and articles for training their AI models? Two judges recently nudged us toward an answer.
More than 40 lawsuits have been filed against AI companies since 2022. The specifics vary, but they generally seek to hold these companies accountable for stealing millions of copyrighted works to develop their technology. (The Atlantic is involved in one such lawsuit, against the AI firm Cohere.
When tech companies first rolled out generative-AI products, some critics immediately feared a media collapse. Every bit of writing, imagery, and video became suspect. But for news publishers and journalists, another calamity was on the horizon.
Chatbots have proved adept at keeping users locked into conversations. They do so by answering every question, often through summarizing articles from news publishers.
Generative-AI companies have been selling a narrative of unprecedented, endless progress. Just last week, OpenAI introduced GPT-4.5 as its “largest and best model for chat yet.” Earlier in February, Google called its latest version of Gemini “the world’s best AI model.” And in January, the Chinese company DeekSeek touted its R1 model as being just as powerful as OpenAI’s o1 model—which Sam Altman had called “the smartest model in the world” the previous month.
Earlier this week, the Telegraph reported a curious admission from OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. In a filing submitted to the U.K. Parliament, the company said that “leading AI models” could not exist without unfettered access to copyrighted books and articles, confirming that the generative-AI industry, worth tens of billions of dollars, depends on creative work owned by other people.
Editor’s note: This article is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. You can search the database for yourself here, and read about its origins here.This summer, I reported on a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others.
Editor’s note: This searchable database is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. You can read about the origins of the database here, and an analysis of what’s in it here.This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others.
One of the most troubling issues around generative AI is simple: It’s being made in secret. To produce humanlike answers to questions, systems such as ChatGPT process huge quantities of written material. But few people outside of companies such as Meta and OpenAI know the full extent of the texts these programs have been trained on.