Business
Column: The AI industry has a battle-tested plan to keep using our content without paying for it
This time in 2023, the world was in thrall to the rise of OpenAI’s dazzling chatbot. ChatGPT was metastasizing like a fungal infection, amassing tens of millions of users a month. Multibillion-dollar partnerships materialized, and investments poured in. Big Tech joined the party. AI image generators like Midjourney took flight.
Just a year later, the mood has darkened. The surprise sacking and rapid reinstatement of OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman gave the company an embarrassing emperor-has-no-clothes moment. Profits are scarce across the sector, and computing costs are sky high. But one issue looms large above all and threatens to bring the fledgling industry back to earth: Copyright.
The legal complaints that cropped up throughout last year have grown into a thundering chorus, and the tech companies say they now present an existential threat to generative AI (the kind that can produce writing, pictures, music and so on). If 2023 was the year the world marveled at AI content generators, 2024 may be the year that the humans who created the raw materials that made that content possible get their revenge — and maybe even claw back some of the value built on their work.
In the last days of December, the New York Times filed a bombshell lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging that “millions of its articles were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.” The Times’ lawsuit joins a host of others — class-action lawsuits filed by illustrators, by the photo service Getty Images, by George R.R. Martin and the Author’s Guild, by anonymous social media users, to name a few — all alleging that companies that stand to profit from generative AI used the work of writers, reporters, artists and others without consent or compensation, infringing on their copyrights in the process.
Our experiments make it all but certain that these systems are in fact training on copyrighted material.
— Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus
Each of these lawsuits have their merits, but the Gray Lady’s entrance into the arena changes the game. For one thing, the Times is influential in shaping national narratives. For another, the Times lawsuit is uniquely damning; it’s loaded with example after example of how ChatGPT replicates news articles nearly verbatim, and offers the responses to its paying customers, free of attribution.
It’s not just the lawsuits: The heat is getting turned up by Congress, researchers and AI experts too. On Wednesday, a congressional hearing saw senators and media industry representatives agree that AI companies should pay licensing fees for the material they use to train their models. “It’s not only morally right,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D.-Conn.), who chairs the subcommittee that held the hearing, according to Wired. “It’s legally required.”
Meanwhile, a fiery study recently published in IEEE Spectrum, co-written by the cognitive scientist and AI expert Gary Marcus and the film industry veteran Reid Southern, shows that Midjourney and Dall-E, two of the leading AI image generators, were trained on copyrighted material, and can regurgitate that material at will — often without even being prompted to.
“Our experiments make it all but certain that these systems are in fact training on copyrighted material,” Marcus told me, something that the companies have been coy about copping to explicitly. “The companies have been far from straightforward in what they’re using, so it was important to establish that they are using copyrighted materials.” Also important: that the copyright-infringing works come spilling out of the systems with little prodding. “You don’t need to prompt it, to say ‘make C3P0’ — you can just say ‘draw golden droid.’ Or ‘Italian plumber’ — it will just draw Mario.”
This has serious implications for anyone using the systems in a commercial capacity. “The companies whose properties are infringed — Mattel, Nintendo — are going to take an interest in this,” Marcus says. “But the user is left vulnerable too — There’s nothing in the output that says what the sources are. In fact the software isn’t capable of doing that in a reliable way. So the users are on the hook and have no clue as to whether it’s infringing or not.”
There’s also a sense of momentum that’s beginning to build behind the simple notion that creators should be compensated for work that’s being used by AI companies valued at billions or tens of billions — or hundreds of billions of dollars, as Google and Microsoft are. The notion that generative AI systems are at root “plagiarism machines” has become increasingly widespread among their critics, and social media is teeming with opprobrium against AI.
But those AI companies aren’t likely to relent. We saw a foreshadowing of how the AI companies would respond to copyright concerns at large last year, when famed venture capitalist and AI evangelist Marc Andreessen’s firm argued that AI companies would go broke if they had to pay copyright royalties or licensing fees. Just this week, British media outlets reported that OpenAI has made the same case, seeking an exemption from copyright rules in England, claiming that the company simply couldn’t operate without ingesting copyrighted materials.
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression — including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents — it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials,” OpenAI argued in its submission to the House of Lords. Note that both Andreessen and OpenAI’s statements underscore the value of copyrighted work in arguing that AI companies shouldn’t have to pay for it. What can they do about it?
First, they’re pleading poverty. There’s just too much material out there to compensate everyone who contributed to making their system work and to making their valuation go through the roof. “Poor little rich company that’s valued at $100 billion can’t afford it,” Marcus says. “I don’t know how well that’s going to wash, but that’s what they’re arguing.”
The AI companies also argue what they’re doing falls under the legal doctrine of fair use — probably the strongest argument they’ve got — because it’s transformative. This argument helped Google win in court against the big book publishers when it was copying books into its massive Google Books database, and defeat claims that YouTube was profiting by allowing users to host and promulgate unlicensed material.
Next, the AI companies argue that copyright-violating outputs like those uncovered by Marcus, Southern and the New York Times are rare or are bugs that are going to be patched.
“They say, ‘Well this doesn’t happen very much. You need to do special prompting.’ But the things we asked it were pretty neutral — and we still got” copyrighted material, Marcus says. “This is not a minor side issue — this is how the systems are built. It is existential for these companies to be able to use this amount of data.” Finally, aside from just making arguments in court and in statements, the AI companies are going to use their ample resources to lobby behind the scenes and throw their power around to help make their case.
Again, the generative AI industry isn’t making much money yet — last year was essentially one massive product demo to hype up the technology. And it worked: The investment dollars did pour in. But that doesn’t mean the AI companies have figured out ways to build a sustainable business model. They’re already operating under the assumption that they will not pay for things such as training materials, licenses or artists’ labor.
Of course, it is in no way true that the likes of Google, Microsoft, or even OpenAI cannot afford to pay to use copyrighted works — but Silicon Valley is at this point used to cutting labor and the cost of creative works out of the equation, and has little reason to think it would not be able to do so again. From Uber to Spotify, the business models of many of this century’s biggest tech companies have been built on the assumption that labor costs could be cut out or minimized. And when creative industries argued that YouTube allowed pirated and unlicensed materials to proliferate at the workers’ expense, and backed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) to fight it, Google was instrumental in stopping the bill, organizing rallies and online campaigns, and lobbying lawmakers to jump ship.
William Fitzgerald, a partner at the Worker Agency and former member of the public policy team at Google, tells me he sees a similar pressure campaign taking shape to fight the copyright cases, one modeled on the playbook Google has used successfully in the past: Marshaling third-party groups and organs such as the Chamber of Progress to push the idea that using copyrighted works for generative AI is not just fair use, but something that’s being embraced by artists themselves, not all of whom are so hung up on things like wanting to be paid for their work. He points to a pro-generative AI open letter signed by AI artists, that was, according to one of the artists involved, organized by Derek Slater, a former Google policy director whose firm works with Google — the same person who took credit for organizing the anti-SOPA efforts. Fitzgerald also sees Google’s fingerprints on Creative Commons’ embrace of the argument that AI art is fair use, as Google is a major funder of the organization.
“It’s worrisome to see Google deploy the same lobbying tactics they’ve developed over the years to ensure workers don’t get paid fairly for their labor,” Fitzgerald said. And OpenAI is close behind. It is not only taking a similar approach to heading off copyright complaints as Google, but it’s also hiring the same people: It hired Fred Von Lohmann, Google’s former director of copyright policy, as its top copyright lawyer. “It appears OpenAI is replicating Google’s lobbying playbook,” he says. “They’ve hired former Google advocates to affect the same playbook that’s been so successful for Google for decades now.”
Things are different this time, however. There was real grassroots animosity against SOPA, which was seen at the time as engineered by Hollywood and the music industry; Silicon Valley was still widely beloved as a benevolent inventor of the future, and many didn’t see how having an artist’s work uploaded to a video platform owned by the good guys on the internet might be detrimental to their economic interests. (Though many did!)
Now, however, workers in the digital world are better prepared. Everyone from Hollywood screenwriters to freelance illustrators to part-time copywriters to full-time coders can recognize the potential material effect of a generative AI system that can ingest their work, replicate it, and offer it to users for a monthly fee — paid to a Silicon Valley corporation, not them.
“It’s asking for an enormous giveaway,” Marcus says. “It’s the equivalent of a major land grab.”
Now, there are many in Silicon Valley who are of course genuinely excited about the potential of AI, and many others who are genuinely oblivious to matters of political economy; who want to see the gains made as quickly as possible, and do not realize how these work-automating systems will be used in practice. Others may simply not care. But for those who do, Marcus says there’s a simple way forward. “There’s an obvious alternative here — OpenAI’s saying that we need all this or we can’t build AI — but they could pay for it!” We want a world with artists and with writers, after all, he adds, one that rewards artistic work — not one where all the money goes to the top because a handful of tech companies won a digital land grab.
“It’s up to workers everywhere to see this for what it is, get organized, educate lawmakers and fight to get paid fairly for their labor,” Fitzgerald says. “Because if they don’t, Google and OpenAI will continue to profit from other people’s labor and content for a long time to come.”
new video loaded: Why Your Paycheck Feels Smaller
By Ben Casselman, Nour Idriss, Sutton Raphael and Stephanie Swart
April 18, 2026
Nearly two years after actor Alec Baldwin was cleared of criminal charges in the “Rust” movie shooting death, a long simmering civil negligence case is inching toward a trial this fall.
On Friday, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge denied a summary judgment motion requested by the film producers Rust Movie Productions LLC, as well as actor-producer Baldwin and his firm El Dorado Pictures to dismiss the case.
During a hearing, Superior Court Judge Maurice Leiter set an Oct. 12 trial date.
The negligence suit was brought more than four years ago by Serge Svetnoy, who served as the chief lighting technician on the problem-plagued western film. Svetnoy was close friends with cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and held her in his arms as she lay dying on the floor of the New Mexico movie set. Baldwin’s firearm had discharged, launching a .45 caliber bullet, which struck and killed her.
The Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe, N.M. in 2021.
(Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)
Svetnoy was the first crew member of the ill-fated western to bring a lawsuit against the producers, alleging they were negligent in Hutchins’ October 2021 death. He maintains he has suffered trauma in the years since. In addition to negligence, his lawsuit also accuses the producers of intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Prosecutors dropped criminal charges against Baldwin, who has long maintained he was not responsible for Hutchins’ death.
“We are pleased with the Court’s decision denying the motions for summary judgment filed by Rust Movie Productions and Mr. Baldwin,” lawyers Gary Dordick and John Upton, who represent Svetnoy, said in a statement following the hearing. “He looks forward to finally having his day in court on this long-pending matter.”
The judge denied the defendants’ request to dismiss the negligence, emotional distress and punitive damages claims. One count directed at Baldwin, alleging assault, was dropped.
Svetnoy has said the bullet whizzed past his head and “narrowly missed him,” according to the gaffer’s suit.
Attorneys representing Baldwin and the producers were not immediately available for comment.
Svetnoy and Hutchins had been friends for more than five years and worked together on nine film productions. Both were immigrants from Ukraine, and they spent holidays together with their families.
On Oct. 21, 2021, he was helping prepare for an afternoon of filming in a wooden church on Bonanza Creek Ranch. Hutchins was conversing with Baldwin to set up a camera angle that Hutchins wanted to depict: a close-up image of the barrel of Baldwin’s revolver.
The day had been chaotic because Hutchins’ union camera crew had walked off the set to protest the lack of nearby housing and previous alleged safety violations with the firearms on the set.
Instead of postponing filming to resolve the labor dispute, producers pushed forward, crew members alleged.
New Mexico prosecutors prevailed in a criminal case against the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez, in March 2024. She served more than a year in a state women’s prison for her involuntary manslaughter conviction before being released last year.
Baldwin faced a similar charge, but the case against him unraveled spectacularly.
On the second day of his July 2024 trial, his criminal defense attorneys — Luke Nikas and Alex Spiro — presented evidence that prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies withheld evidence that may have helped his defense . The judge was furious, setting Baldwin free.
Variety first reported on Friday’s court action.
The highest gas prices in the country are making it tougher for some gig drivers to make a living.
Gas prices have shot up amid the war in the Middle East. On average, California gas prices are the most expensive in the United States, according to data from the American Automobile Assn. The average price of regular gas in California is almost $6. The national average is a little above $4.
While Uber and Lyft drivers have concocted clever ways to cut gas consumption, they say that without some relief they will be forced to leave the ride-hailing business.
John Mejia was already struggling to make money as a part-time Lyft driver when soaring gas prices made his side hustle even harder.
“Unfortunately, it’s the economics of paying less to drivers and gas prices,” he said. “It actually is pulling people out of the business.”
Guests at The Westin St. Francis hotel get into an Uber.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Gig work offers drivers the freedom to work for themselves and more flexibility, but being independent contractors also means they must shoulder unexpected costs.
Ride-sharing companies say they’re trying to help, but drivers say the gas relief comes with caveats. For now, drivers say they’re being pickier about what rides they accept, cutting hours and are looking at other ways to make money.
Mejia, who started driving for Lyft more than a decade ago, said in his early days, he would sometimes make $400 in three hours. Now it takes 12 hours to rake in $200.
The San Francisco Bay Area consultant is an active member of the California Gig Workers Union, so he knows he isn’t alone. California has more than 800,000 gig rideshare drivers, according to the group, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union.
On social media sites such as Reddit and Facebook, gig workers have posted about how the higher gas prices are eating into their earnings. Among the tricks they are suggesting: reducing the number of times the ignition is turned on or off, avoiding traffic, working in specific neighborhoods and at times with high demand and switching to electric vehicles.
Gig drivers usually have only seconds to decide whether to accept a ride on the app, but they have become more strategic about which rides and deliveries they accept.
That means they are more likely to sit back in their cars and wait for higher fares for quick pick-up and drop-off.
“I highly recommend the ‘decline and recline’ strategy, rejecting unprofitable rides until a better one appears,” wrote Sergio Avedian, a driver, in the popular blog the Rideshare Guy.
Pedestrians cross the street in front of a Lyft and Uber driver on Wednesday. High gas prices have made it hard for gig drivers to make a living, cutting into their profits.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Uber, Lyft and other companies have unveiled several ways to help drivers save on gas.
Uber said drivers can get up to 15% cash back through May 26 with the Uber Pro card, a business debit Mastercard for drivers and couriers. Based on a worker’s tier, they can get up to $1 off per gallon of gas through Upside — an app that offers cash rewards — and up to 21 cents off per gallon of gas with Shell Fuel Rewards. The company also offers incentives for drivers who want to switch to electric vehicles.
“We know the price of gas is top of mind for many rideshare and delivery drivers across the country right now,” Uber said in a blog post about its gas savings efforts.
Lyft also said it’s expanding gas relief through May 26 because the company knows that the extra cost “hits hardest for drivers who depend on driving for their income.”
The company is offering more cash back, depending on the driver’s tier, for drivers who use a Lyft Direct business debit card to pay for gas at eligible gas stations. They can get an additional 14 cents per gallon off through Upside.
Drivers say the fine print on the offers dictates which card they use and where they fill up gas, making it difficult for them to save money.
“If I do the math, it’s ridiculous,” Mejia said. “They’re offering us nothing.”
Uber declined to comment, but pointed to its blog post about the gas relief efforts. Lyft also referenced the blog post and said “the gas savings were structured through rewards to maximize stackable opportunities.”
Guests at The Westin St. Francis hotel get into an Uber.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Gig workers have struggled with rising gas prices in the past.
In 2022, Lyft and Uber temporarily added a surcharge to their fares amid record-high gas prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This year, Uber is adding a fuel charge to its fares in Australia for roughly two months to offset the high cost of gas for drivers. Lyft said it hasn’t added a fuel charge in the U.S. or elsewhere.
Margarita Penalosa, who drives full time for Uber and Lyft in Los Angeles, started as a rideshare driver in 2017. Back then, gas was cheaper. She would easily hit her goal of making $300 in eight hours. Now she’s making just $250 after working as much as 14 hours.
Gas prices, she said, used to be less than $3 per gallon. Now some gas stations are charging more than $8 per gallon.
“Take out the gas. Take out the mileage from my car and maintenance. How much [do] I really make? Probably I get $11 for an hour,” she said.
Jonathan Tipton Meyers wants to spend fewer hours as a rideshare driver.
He already juggles multiple gigs even while driving for Uber and Lyft in Los Angeles. He’s a mobile notary and loan signing agent, a writer and performer.
Driving is “a very challenging, full-time job,” he said. “It’s very taxing and, of course, wages were just continually decreasing.”
John Mejia, a longtime Lyft and Uber driver, poses for a portrait before attending a meeting about unionizing gig drivers.
(Jess Lynn Goss / For The Times)
Even if oil continues to flow through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran reopened Friday, it could take a while for gas prices to come down to earth, said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.
“There’s an old adage that prices rise like a rocket and fall like a feather,” he said. “I think that’ll apply.”
In the meantime, it will be survival of the fittest drivers. If enough of them decide to leave the apps, the ride-hailing companies could be forced to raise fares further to attract some back.
“Those who approach rideshare driving strategically, tracking expenses, choosing trips carefully, and optimizing efficiency are far more likely to weather periods of high gas prices,” wrote Avedian in the Rideshare Guy blog. “For everyone else, a spike at the pump can quickly turn rideshare driving from a side hustle into a money-losing venture.”
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