The Trouble with AI: Top 10 Legal and Executive Responses
As promised, I am laying out the most significant legal and executive action concerning AI. When I told you in December, it would be a year of exposure, lawsuits, regulatory backlash, and people.
100% no lies told.
This is not intended to be comprehensive but to highlight a narrative of events starting to show some interesting subtext. I excluded multiple other copyright lawsuits and other general AI lawsuits.
1) In June of 2023, a 160-page lawsuit was filed against Open AI and their start-up funding LPs and LLPs by a group of unnamed people.
The suit makes the following claims:
a) Unauthorized data acquisition: The plaintiff alleges that OpenAI illegally extracted private data from user interactions with its products and applications integrated with ChatGPT without valid authorization.
b) Violation of Privacy and Property Laws: Plaintiff contends OpenAI’s actions contravene federal and state privacy and property laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
c) Web scraping and violation of terms of service: The plaintiff asserts that OpenAI engaged in covert web scraping, infringing terms of service agreements and applicable laws
d) Theft and Conversion: Plaintiff alleges OpenAI’s actions constitute theft and conversion of private data.
2) In July GPT of 2023, We Started Hearing that Bytedance Had Stolen GPT Technology
The company claims there was no reporting back to the Chinese government and that it was simply using Open AI tools. (This is also what the NY Times said when OAI insisted it “hacked” into their system to discover the illegal usage of their tool. Oh, that razor-sharp double edge hurts, doesn’t it?)
3) Also in July, the FTC opens an investigation into Sam Altman and Open AI for illegal data collection.
The investigation takes specific aim at illegal data collection and inaccuracy, indirectly referencing another suit that didn’t make it into these highlights.
4) In September 2023, there was a lawsuit by US Consumer Privacy against Open AI LP for the illegal, obtaining, sharing, and misuse of American personal data from social media platforms.
This suit claims Open AI used stolen private information, including personally identifiable information, from hundreds of millions of internet users, including children of all ages, without their informed consent or knowledge. Furthermore, Defendants continue to unlawfully collect and feed additional personal data from millions of unsuspecting consumers worldwide, far over any reasonably authorized use, to continue developing and training the Products.
5) Also in September, the June proposed class action lawsuit was voluntarily dropped while reserving the right to refile.
I don’t have much information on this now, but I presume this to be a strategic withdrawal that may have to do with the FTC investigation.
6) In December 2023, NY Times sued Open AI for illegally obtaining their copyrighted materials and training.
Defendants’ unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service. Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) tools rely on large-language models (“LLMs”) that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more. While Defendants engaged in widescale copying from many sources, they gave Times content particular emphasis when building their LLMs—revealing a preference that recognizes the value of those works. Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as “Copilot”) and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.
7) Also in December, Open AI announced Bytedance’s account with Chat GPT was suspended for alleged illegal tool use.
Some might call this a nickel short and a dime late. But then:
8) In February, an EO Executive Order seen as an expansion of EO 13873 of May 15, 2019 (Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain) is issued concernAmericans’ans’ private data.
The continuing effort of certain countries of concern to access Americans’ sensitive personal data and United States Government-related data constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security and foreign policy of the United States. Access to Americans’ bulk sensitive personal data or United States Government-related data increases the ability of countries of concern to engage in a wide range of malicious activities. Countries of concern can rely on advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), to analyze and manipulate bulk sensitive personal data to engage in espionage, influence, kinetic, or cyber operations or to identify other potential strategic advantages over the United States.
9) March Elon Musk Sues Open Musk’s
Musk’s lawsuit bears the hallmarks of Musk himself, full of sweeping generalizations and braggadocio. But the demands that weighting approaches be revealed, the claim that GPT 4 is a threshold for AGI, and that the versions beyond 4 ARE AGI are absurd and still veiled in secrecy and insinuation rather than evidence. As you knI’m I’m pretty skeptical that we are close to anything resembling true reasoning power, beyond programming a parametrically rigged and weighted set of what amount to a sizeable rules-based database, simply from the amount of human inputs needed to keep it running. You say a trillion parameters is “semi-supervised,” I say. Potato potahto. Not to mention the overfit this causes.
10) CODA: The Corporate Transparency Act went into effect in 2024.
At this writing, at least 11 different LLCs or LPs appear to be attached to Open AI. At the end of this year, the Corporate Transparency Act fully requires ALL LLCs to reveal financial relationships with offshore and nearshore companies. That is something I want to see spelled out.
My friends. aren’t even through Q1, and these are just the highlights.
100% no lies told.
