Alex Heath’s latest Command Line newsletter is a dispatch from the Cerebral Valley AI conference, where everyone knew they were playing fast and loose with copyright law, with no answers on how to handle the problem. If the open letters and regulators don’t slow the pace of AI down, the lawsuits certainly will!

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I was frankly amazed that no one onstage had much to say about the growing copyright concern around generative AI. “I don’t think anyone has the answer right now,” Cristóbal Valenzuela, the CEO of an AI startup called Runway that generates videos and images. Stability AI is being sued by Getty for allegedly using photos it didn’t license to train its models. Emad Mostaque declined to comment on the case itself beyond pointing out that he hired “the person who wrote the book on fair use leading our defense.”

There was a lot of talk throughout the day about the importance of letting people opt out of being included in model training, though it’s clear copyright has been an afterthought for the industry to date. I have a feeling that will come back to bite everyone who isn’t already taking this seriously.