Hi everyone,
I stumbled upon this update about Google’s use of generative AI and thought a deeper dive into some of their new uses of AI would be interesting. As seen in this news article, Google has joined Microsoft, Adobe, and others in pledging to protect consumers who use their generative AI products from IP violations. This protection extends to users as long as users do not “intentionally create or use generated output to infringe the rights of others”, although there is no clarification as to how this exception may be applied or enforced. Expectedly, this stance opposes the complaints of authors who claim their copyright is infringed when models sample from their created materials when undergoing training and teaching processes. However, proponents of AI like Google argue that this use should fall under the Fair Use exception in US Copyright Law, which requires a “transformative” use.
I also found another article that outlined some of the ways that Google is internally using AI and many of these are mind-boggling. Apparently, they have developed a model that predicts local flooding in response to severe weather systems, in addition to expanding to wildfire predictions. Given the effects of climate change leading to more frequent extreme weather, this holds great potential to allow communities to prepare and prevent the worst impacts of these weather conditions. Another use of AI described is Project Greenlight which uses data from streetlights to help optimize how long each streetlight should last before changing to minimize traffic stoppages and greenhouse gas emissions. Google also announced a new search tool that will allow doctors to pull information from various forms of health records so it can be accessed in one place, meant to cut down on the massive amount of time doctors need to spend on administrative work.
Those are clearly positive uses of AI, right? Well apparently even they might come at a cost given the extreme energy cost described here. Google itself has the potential to use as much energy as the country of Ireland if it switches entirely to AI, and the whole AI industry is on pace to use as much as Argentina or Sweden by 2027.
What are your thoughts on all these new uses of AI? Do you feel comfortable with the extent to which our society seems to be moving in this direction? Should authors be compensated for the use of their copyrighted material in AI models or is its use transformative enough? I’m curious to see what people think!
Communications Law