Is it too late for us to fight AI over copyright?
PLUS: You can generate videos & songs now from prompts in seconds... for free
This month I celebrated 20 years of employment (not consistently, of course, but mostly, save the odd cashing in my pension to go to Cambodia to try and “find myself”). On June the 1st 2004 I started as an intern at Men’s Health magazine and immediately loved that I would be getting paid to write for a massive magazine (though my first assignment was creating slogans for coffee cups as part of a Vida e Caffe 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, has dropped from 283,216 to 11,889 in circulation in the last ten 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 is 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 which 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” just 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 is too late?
Scott Galloway, a Professor of marketing at the New York University 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.
It’s true that some moves are 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 (who manufacture the chips that are needed in AI processing) has added the total market cap of the global film industry to their total in just the last 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.
Though, the wheels are turning in the music industry: record labels are suing two AI startups for copyright infringement. The cases are against Suno, 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” and it came up with the song “Cold Rage” (embedded below).
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 was going to be dramatic I would say that the reason this isn’t working is because 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.
4 lessons on AI from the Africa Media Perspectives conference
I was honoured to be asked to host a panel on AI and Africa on the weekend. Here is what I learnt:
isiZulu translation in ChatGPT is now good enough to use as a template for producing your content in that language (but you still need a human translator to finish the work). This is according to Mungo Soggot, CEO of Scrolla.Africa.
Building AI tools exclusively for journalists and expecting to get an adequate return on your investment is tough, according to Mallick Mnela, founder of iHubOnline in Malawi (I wrote more about Mallick’s work here).
We have to keep talking about policy and regulatory change says Dr Clare Cook, Head of Journalism and Media Viability at International Media Support.
Audiences are going to change their habits. The existential threat to content creators is the prospect of an always-on assistant which they never need to move away from. We need to evolve our content to roll with these possible changes.
What AI was used in creating this newsletter?
The image. And it isn’t lost on me that I asked it to infringe on the copyright of the beloved graphic novel Watchmen to create it… though it didn’t do a great job of emulating the original product.
This week’s AI tool for people to use…
Since OpenAI announced the coming of Sora (I wrote about this back in February) we have been waiting for the crazy prompt-to-video revolution. Luma Labs have beat OpenAI to it with Dream Machine. It is astounding.
This video was created in a few minutes on the day the service launched. I used the prompt: “a white british man who lives in hout bay in Cape town has packed up everything he owns to move to somerset west to live with his black zimbabwean wife. we see the wife is happy to see him and that the man has a huge amount of stuff.” However, word has spread about this service so you will need to wait a little longer to process a video now (if you are on the free tier).
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What is happening at Develop AI?
This week I am in Johannesburg to do an epic AI training in partnership with Public Media Alliance and the SABC with funding from the Grace Wyndham Goldie (BBC) Trust. The workshop will address the challenges posed by the rollout of AI tools by exploring how they can be best used in an ethical and responsible way. It is great to be back in Joburg, you beautiful beast of a city.
See you next week. All the best,
Develop Al is an innovative company that reports on AI and provides training on how to use AI effectively and responsibly.
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