A plea has been filed in the Delhi High Court seeking directions to the Centre to formulate appropriate rules and regulations aimed at protecting talented artists from the unauthorized use of their original works by AI platforms.
Plea also seeks directions against the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to amend the IT Act with the aim to develop a framework for enforcing and regulating Artificial Intelligence to mitigate potential system and societal risks.
A bench comprising Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela listed the plea for hearing alongside a pending matter concerning the misuse of deepfake technology.
The Court referred to its recent directions to a committee set up by the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to examine the issue of deepfakes.
In its order dated November 21, the Bench instructed the committee to engage with various stakeholders, including internet intermediaries, telecom service providers, victims of deepfake technology, and websites using deepfakes.
A plea filed by Kanchan Nagar, Vikas Saboo, and Mash Audio Visuals Private Limited claims that artificial intelligence platforms are unlawfully using the original works of artists as data sets to train generative AI software.
This practice, they argue, constitutes a serious violation of the copyright protections granted to artists under the Copyright Act, 1957.
Furthermore, the petitioners contend that AI’s use of these works is jeopardizing the livelihoods of artists by replacing their jobs, ultimately threatening the sustainability of their careers, it stated.
Plea stated that the artists have become prey to AI stealing their original copyrighted works for using them as data sets to train AI Software by various AI platforms without obtaining their consent or providing fair compensation to the original creators/holders of copyrighted works for the use of their intellectual property.
It has recently come to light that AI software are being trained to generate images clicked by photographers by stealing the images uploaded on stock photography websites such as Images Bazaar by misuse of AI system to train AI software through AI model training.
Such AI platforms illegally, without any permission access copyrighted images stock photography websites, and feed them into their AI platforms and train them to generate Images that are conceptually similar to the photo shot by a photographer after creating a sketch and putting in hard work, however, with a different output.
Such acts of AI platforms infringe intellectual property rights, both in how such platforms use the images of photographers, as available on Images Bazaar as data inputs for the purposes of training and developing stable diffusion, as well as the output generated by such diffusion, which lead to synthetic images that reproduce the copyright work, plea added.
This not only undermines the collective artistic efforts of the creative professionals such as the ones employed by Images Bazaar but also constitutes a serious violation of the personality rights of the freelance models that have posed in such images clicked by photographers, it added.
The work of these artists such as photographers, writers, music producers, designers etc. is being used to train AI systems which can create images and texts that replicate their artistic style is an existential threat for the artists and other creators, plea read.