Lauren Goode: Well, speaking of Darth Vader, Disney recently licensed the use of Darth Vader's voice for a chatbot in Fortnite. Everybody knows what Fortnite is, right? And what's interesting about this is this deal ended up causing some backlash from the actors in SAG-AFTRA, which is the union that represents actors and voice actors and stuff like that, where they were arguing that this is an example of AI-generated voices replacing their work, their very human work, without authorization, and Disney has also reportedly been in conversations with companies like OpenAI about potential partnerships. So what's interesting about this lawsuit is it's Disney pushing back against Midjourney for what it feels is unfair and illegal use of its intellectual property, but Disney itself is taking these steps to embrace AI in Hollywood.
Katie Drummond: Well, and I think all of these lawsuits and this lawsuit, and then just even these deals that Disney is doing, these licensing deals, all of it combined I think just highlights how little regulation or legislation exists around how AI can and cannot be used when it comes to copyrighted work and IP. And so you're basically asking courts to make their own judgments on these cases, but there's no framework really to underpin exactly what they are deciding on or what those decisions are based on. Kate, is that your understanding of where we are in terms of any sort of actual regulation around this?
Kate Knibbs: Yeah, it's definitely I think going to be something that the courts are going to be left to decide, especially because the Big Beautiful Bill's ten year moratorium on AI legislation at the state level seems to be going. And I will say, a lot of people on both sides don't seem that upset about this. I think there's a sense that it might be really difficult to regulate this properly without stifling innovation. We're not seeing a huge clamoring for federal law to provide the guard rails here. Basically, it's going to be decided by the courts. Probably the first case that goes will go all the way up to SCOTUS.
Michael Calore: Wow. I hope that Yoda smoking a joint is on the official record at the US Supreme Court. All right. Well, let's take a quick break and we'll come right back. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So we've been talking about the recent lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal against Midjourney, but the AI copyright battle isn't just happening in Hollywood, it's happening everywhere. And our guest today, Kate Knibbs, created a tracking page where WIRED readers can see how AI copyright lawsuits are unfolding across many industries. Kate, can you tell us about some of the main lawsuits that have caught your eye, and which industries seem to be the most active in suing AI companies?
Kate Knibbs: So there was a lot of movement initially with book authors suing AI companies and then now media outlets suing them, visual artists, and more recently, there have been some music labels. The Disney case is also notable because it's the first time Hollywood Studios jumped in. They weren't really in this world yet. The media companies, I would say the biggest player there is the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI. The lawsuit that it filed, I heard similar things about that one that I did about the Disney one, which is that it's just exceptionally well argued and it had a lot of emphasis on showing outputs of the LLMs that were identical to New York Times articles. So that one is definitely a major one to watch, but there have been some movement in a few others. Kadri versus Meta, which is Richard Kadri is a novelist, a group of novelists sued Meta. That one's been really spicy because it came out in discovery that Meta had pirated a lot of the books that it ended up training on and it openly admits that it did this, and the judge who's sitting on that case is just a character, so I really like watching the hearings for entertainment value. If anyone out there is as big of a nerd as I am, you can live stream them, and I recommend it. That might be one of the first to either go to trial or go to summary judgment. And then Barts verse Anthropic is another novelist. That one is also progressing quickly and the judge sitting is really well known being well-versed in fair use, so something might happen there. And then Suno and Udio, that are two AI song generators, they got sued by the major music labels, more recently, but there have been talks happening already between the labels and the song generators, settlement talks. So if those settle, that will be a huge deal because we've been looking for what's going to go to trial and what's going to settle. I could go on, but I think those are the ones that I think you guys should know about.