BREAKING: @OpenAI must tuner over 20 million+ chat logs to plaintiffs, Judge Ona Wang has ruled in a 9-pg Order just issued: Judge Wang found that nothing put forward by @OpenAI in its Motion for Reconsideration of her original Order to produce the logs compelled a different result....

NEW SUIT: Encyclopaedia @Britannica and its sub @MerriamWebster have sued @Perplexity_AI for direct © infringement in the SDNY where it's defending a similar suit by @DowJones. The case is based on both inputs to genAI models and their outputs; "RAG" features prominently: 🧵⏬ In addition to familiarly claiming that scraping training data from the internet is direct infringement at what it calls the "curation" stage of development, plaintiffs' extensively plead harm from "RAG": retrieval-augmented generation, an advertised hallmark of @Perplexity_AI:

The Register of ©s merited reinstatement by clearing a high legal bar. Release of the @CopyrightOffice's pre-pub "AI training and fair use" Report was central to the detailed ruling. Both majority judges were Biden appointees; the Prez's pick dissented. Let's look deeper:🧵👀 The opinion's perhaps most impactful (and potentially precedentially most important) statement comes 10 pages in as the Court implicitly back's Perlmutter's allegation that her firing constituted, "The Executive's ... blatant interference with the work of a Legislative Branch official....":

No other way to say it; the text is out and the Hawley/Blumenthal "Cripple GenAI Act of 2025" (my title) will do *exactly* that by eviscerating fair use and gen AI training, probably unconstitutionally so.

Let's break it down:🧵👀🫣 If the sponsors hadn't trumpeted it you might not catch how broad and damaging this bill will be b/c it's optically a personal data protection measure. BUT, it would let anyone with a copyright - registered or not - sue an AI developer for massive damages. Specifically:

.@AnthropicAI Seeks Summary Judgment in Bartz: Complex as © and genAI can be, the parties agree on the facts and there's just one real legal issue – whether inputting full books at scale to train gen AI is transformative fair use or infringing (ie, not re outputs or the DMCA):🧵 It's gonna' be a whale of an argument before Judge Alsup on May 15 and plaintiffs have yet to weigh in but @AnthropicAI has just set the table:

THREADING NOW: @NYTIMES counsel now explainihg to the Judge that high quality material is "weighted" more heavily during training. This can produce "regurgitation" in which the model "spits out" actual "training data that it saw" and "memorized in response to specific prompts. Another technology called "retrieval augmented generation" discussed at Para 78 of the Daily News' complaint

Humorist Will Rogers gave us The Law of Holes: "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." @SuchirBalaji doesn't seem to know it or the law, origins, purposes, or social and economic value of #FairUse, but he keeps digging:
. Let's break it down:

https://x.com/suchirbalaji/status/1849192575758139733

Let's start with common ground. I enthusiastically agree, as Mr. Balaji writes, that "it's important for even non-lawyers to understand the law -- both the letter of it, and also why it's actually there in the first place."

Sorry to say, he's 0 for 2...

@ednewtonrex's grousing about @Google proudly pointing to its Nobel-winning #GenAI wizards in a legal filing citing AI's power for good shows a fallacy at the root of the © cartel's own logic and attack on #FairUse: "when all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail": @Google's sin? "[I]ntentionally eliding AI for scientific discovery with AI for creating media." THAT's the rub! The most powerful #GenAI models like @Google's don't, can't, and shouldn't distinguish b/w outputs if we want their maximum benefit, and . . .

https://x.com/ednewtonrex/status/1844444757453570277