AI Legal & Regulatory News Update—Week Of 10/22/23

Below is this week's tracker of the latest legal and regulatory developments in the United States and internationally:

AI Intellectual Property Update:

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is a plaintiff in a new class action brought against Meta, Microsoft, EleutherAI, and Bloomberg. The complaint alleges that LLMs developed by these companies used their work without permission to train generative AI models. The lawsuit focuses on the "Books3" repository, "a dataset of information scraped from a large collection of approximately 183,000 pirated ebooks, most of which were published in the past 20 years." The case is Huckabee et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al., 1:23-cv-09152 (SDNY).
A group of music publishers, including Universal Music Group, has sued AI company Anthropic for alleged infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics through its AI tool Claude. The music publishers allege that Claude's results use phrases extremely similar to existing lyrics "even when the models are not specifically asked to do so." The case is Concord Music Group Inc. et al. v. Anthropic PBC, 3:23-cv-01092 (M.D. Tenn.)
A Reuters article discusses Google's new Search Generative Experience tool, which uses AI to create summaries in response to search queries. For instance, "[s]earching for 'Who is Jon Fosse' - the recent Nobel Prize in Literature winner - [] generates three paragraphs on the writer and his work. Drop-down buttons provide links to Fosse content on Wikipedia, NPR, The New York Times and other websites; additional links appear to the right of the summary."
YouTube is in the process of developing an AI-powered tool that allows users to replicate the voice of famous musicians while recording audio, and has reportedly approached music companies to obtain the rights to train its new AI tool on songs from their music catalogs.
Universal Music Group announced that it has partnered with digital music firm BandLab Technologies to help protect the rights of artists and songwriters amid the growing use of artificial intelligence. The "expansive, industry-first strategic relationship" will "pioneer market-led solutions with pro-creator standards to ensure new technologies serve the creator community effectively and ethically."

AI Policy Update:

Federal:

The FCC is proposing to launch a notice of inquiry regarding how AI can help the agency combat growing frustration with unwanted robocalls and robotexts. The proposal, if adopted at the Commission's November 15, 2023 public open meeting, would begin an inquiry into advantages and disadvantages of using AI technologies to protect consumers from robocalls and texts under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer cautioned against moving too fast on AI regulation, noting: "If you move too quickly in this, you may screw it up. The EU went very fast, and now they're backing off because they realized they made a lot of mistakes. So that's another-there are so many needles to thread, threading the needle between encouraging the good innovation but having guardrails that prevent bad innovation and not having the one unbalance the other."
The Biden administration is expected to unveil its anticipated artificial intelligence executive order on Monday.
Senators Brian Schatz and John Kennedy have introduced a bipartisan bill to boost transparency of AI-generated content. The AI Labeling Act of 2023 would require "clear and conspicuous" disclosures to be placed on any "image, video, audio, or multimedia" or text-based content, such as a chatbot, that is generated by AI.
The Atlantic magazine writes that the future of generative AI may be in the hands of four companies under the acronym GOMA: "Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic."

European Union:

A fifth round of trilogue negotiations (the final stage of the EU legislative process) on the EU AI Act kicked off this week. Issues such as exemptions to the scope of the EU AI Act, classification of AI systems, foundation models, governance and enforcement are expected to be discussed.
Reuters reports that "EU lawmakers agreed on a critical part of new rules on artificial intelligence in a meeting late on Tuesday, as they inched closer to a broader agreement on the landmark AI Act." A fifth round of trilogue negotiations (final stage of the EU legislative process) on the EU AI Act kicked off this week. Issues such as exemptions to the scope of the EU AI Act, classification of AI systems, foundation models, governance and enforcement are expected to be discussed.
The European Data Protection Supervisor, the European Union's independent data protection authority, issued an Opinion on the EU AI Act proposal in light of the legislative developments. Among others, the EDPS stressed that AI systems already in use at the date of applicability of the EU AI Act, including AI systems which are components of EU large-scale IT systems, should not be exempted from the scope of the EU AI Act.
President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen committed over the past weekend to enhancing transatlantic tech cooperation, particularly on cybersecurity and AI.

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