Lobbying in EU proves – stopping copyright regulation is a top priority

The tech giants also pushed back on three issues that would undermine their existing approaches to developing foundational models: increased transparency, disclosure of copyrighted materials, and reporting environmental impact. Tech firms argued that transparency – including a requirement to inform someone that they are interacting with an AI – should only apply to “image, audio and video” (Microsoft) or “deep fakes” (Google). Importantly, this would exclude the textual output of LLMs and leave many chatbots, the likes of ChatGPT, free from transparency obligations. The same would go for the search systems of Google and Microsoft, which are increasingly powered by AI. Both Google and Microsoft also argued for the removal of copyright disclosure requirements for foundation models. Large language models are often trained on hundreds of billions of words of text, and many of these include copyrighted materials. Big Tech argued that this was “disproportionate and burdensome” (Microsoft); “unnecessary and difficult to implement” (Google); or “not the right place to regulate copyright” (Meta/Facebook). The fact that Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, and Meta have all been sued for copyright violations presumably had nothing to do with their recommendations on this topic!