https://lwn.net/Articles/945504/
'The AI boom is clearly upon us, but there are still plenty of questions
swirling around this technology. Some of those questions are legal ones and
there have been lawsuits filed to try to get clarification—and perhaps monetary
damages. Van Lindberg is a lawyer who is well-known in the open-source world;
he came to Open Source Summit Europe 2023 in Bilbao, Spain to try to put the
current work in AI into its legal context.
Lindberg began by introducing himself; he has been involved in computer law for
around 25 years at this point. Throughout that time he also worked in open
source (notably as the former General Counsel for the Python Software
Foundation). He has also been working on AI issues since 2008, so he is
well-positioned to assist in those matters now that "the entire world started
going crazy about AI".
He asked the audience whether they primarily identify as technologists or
members of the legal field; the response was "not quite half and half", he
said, but noted that he would disappoint both groups, "just in different parts
of the presentation". His technical description of the techniques being used in
AI today would perhaps be somewhat boring for the technologists, while the
cases he would talk about are likely already known to those with legal
training. But, he said, the good news is that the intersection of AI and law is
such a rapidly developing field that there should be something new in his talk
for everyone.
In the talk, he would only be focusing on "generative machine learning"; he is
aware of the older AI research, but "generative ML is the thing that has really
started to drive this AI revolution". It is also much more interesting and
challenging from a legal perspective. He would be looking at the advances in
the field over just the last five years, though most of what he would present
is from the last three or four years, he said.
His presentation is a shortened version of his paper that was published earlier
in 2023. It looks at how models are trained and the inferences they perform,
along with the copyright implications from a US perspective. The talk would be
US-law-focused, as well, because that is "where a lot of the current action
is". He pointed to a UK-law-focused article for those who are interested; so
far, he has been unable to find a similar work that looks at the issue from an
EU-law perspective.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
