Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs The fight between creators and AI tech titans over copyright law and licensing is heating up. In a letter submitted to the Trump administration’s office of science and technology policy on March 15, over 400 actors, writers and directors called for the government to uphold current copyright law. The signatories include Paul McCartney, Guillermo del Toro, Ava Duvernay, Cynthia Erivo, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ayo Edebiri, Chris Rock and Mark Ruffalo. The letter specifically asks the government not to grant fair use exceptions to tech companies training AI. Fair use is a fundamental concept in copyright law that gives folks an exception to use protected content even if they aren’t the copyright holder, in limited and specific cases. Previously, AI companies, hungry for human-generated content to train and improve their AI models, have needed to pay publishers and content catalogs for access to that material. A fair use exception would make it easier for tech companies to access content without costly legal hurdles.Google and OpenAI proposed similar changes to current copyright law in their proposals for the administration’s AI Action plan. Google wrote that such exceptions allow it to “avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development.” OpenAI wrote that fair use protections for AI are necessary to protect American national security.Part of the recent governmental push around AI is concerns over losing global standing and a technological edge over AI development to adversaries like China. Chinese AI, like ChatGPT rival DeepSeek, is continuing to process but concerns abound over its security and lack of guardrails. In other words, tech companies like Google and OpenAI, each valued by market cap in the hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars, don’t want to go through the established legal process and pay for the rights to the content they need to make their AIs competitive with those being developed by China. And they want the Trump administration to codify protections for them as part of its AI Action plan.The Hollywood signatories strongly oppose the possibility of such a rewriting of copyright law. “America didn’t become a global cultural powerhouse by accident,” the letter reads. “Our success stems directly from our fundamental respect for IP and copyright that rewards creative risk-taking by talented and hardworking Americans from every state and territory.”The US Copyright Office has been developing guidance for how to handle copyright claims for AI-generated content. But people have been worried for years about — and even sued over — how AI models are trained in a way that potentially violates the rights of copyright holders. The dual strikes in summer 2023 by members from the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, included AI as one of their chief concerns. Neither OpenAI nor Google have shared exactly what content makes up their training databases for ChatGPT and Gemini. The copyright equation gets even more complicated as we know of at least one company that’s received a copyright claim for an image whose every part is generated by AI. It leaves room for uncertainty on every side of the mess that is copyright and AI.The Trump administration and AIUp until this point, there hasn’t been much meaningful progress on government oversight or legislation regulating how tech giants like OpenAI and Google develop AI. Former President Biden got many of the major tech companies to voluntarily pledge to develop AI responsibly and tried to enact some guardrails around AI development via executive order. But within hours of being inaugurated, Trump rolled back Biden’s AI executive order with one of his own.In his own executive order on AI, Trump said he wants to “sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance.” The AI Action plan is how he plans to enact his version of tech policy. Vice President Vance introduced the plan, and more broadly the administration’s view on the tech, at an international summit on AI in January. Vance said: “When conferences like this convene to discuss a cutting-edge technology, oftentimes, I think our response is to be too self-conscious, too risk-averse. But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly calls us to do precisely the opposite.”In addition to the call for feedback, a January executive order from President Trump called for American AI to be “free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.” At the same time, tech leaders like Google’s Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have been cozying up to the new administration. Altman donated a million dollars of his own money to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Google as a company donated the same. Altman and Pichai got front-row seats for the swearing-in ceremony, along with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, X’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The executives likely hope that getting on Trump’s good side will help them pave the road for their tech company’s futures — even if, in this case, it would upset decades of established copyright law.Many groups of people — not just creators — are worried that unregulated development and use of AI could be disastrous.What comes next for copyright and AI?The US Copyright Office is expected to release one more report on AI, specifically about “legal implications of training AI models on copyrighted works, licensing considerations, and the allocation of any potential liability.”In the meantime, a number of active lawsuits could set important precedents for the judicial branch. Thomson Reuters just won its case that said an AI company did not have a fair use case to use its content to build AI. Legislation like the NO FAKES Act is also running its way through Congress, but it’s unclear what kind of future AI legislation will have.For more, check out how AI and art clash at SXSW and why one company’s anti-AI pledge is resonating with creators.
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
fbq(‘set’, ‘autoConfig’, false, ‘789754228632403’);
fbq(‘init’, ‘789754228632403’);
