Why one AI executive quit his job to protest creators' rights

Programming note: Platformer will be off Thursday for the Thanksgiving holiday.

One of the fiercest debates in artificial intelligence — perhaps second only to who should be CEO of OpenAI — is whether and how creators should be compensated when their work is used to train models for generative AI. For the most part, today’s most popular large language models have been created without the consent of the people whose work now powers them. And arguments about the issue have now spilled over into lawsuits.

Earlier this month, AI companies, including StabilityAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Microsoft, submitted comments to the US Copyright Office on potential rules that would govern how corporations use copyrighted work. While the companies offered varying opinions, the core of their argument was that AI companies should be able to train LLMs using copyrighted works without compensating their creators, according to Wes Davis at The Verge.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, many creators disagree. But to date, they have struggled to gain much ground in court. Today, a federal judge dismissed most of the claims made by comedian Sarah Silverman in one such lawsuit against Meta.

Here’s Winston Cho at the Hollywood Reporter:

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria on Monday offered a full-throated denial of one of the authors’ core theories that Meta’s AI system is itself an infringing derivative work made possible only by information extracted from copyrighted material. “This is nonsensical,” he wrote in the order. “There is no way to understand the LLaMA models themselves as a recasting or adaptation of any of the plaintiffs’ books.”

But while they have struggled to convince judges, creators won support in surprising place last week. Ed Newton-Rex, who was the vice president of audio at Stability AI, abruptly resigned from his job. In an op-ed, Newton-Rex wrote that he disagreed with the company’s stance on fair use. “Companies worth billions of dollars are, without permission, training generative AI models on creators’ works, which are then being used to create new content that in many cases can compete with the original works,” he wrote. 

On Friday, Newton-Rex spoke with Platformer about why he left, what the ideal arrangement is between AI companies, and how much he expects to make from his own musical efforts. 

Zoë Schiffer: You recently resigned from your role as the VP of Audio at Stability AI, and published an op-ed